Obsession is considered a horror film, and it technically is. But the particular horror it carries doesn’t exist only in fiction; it doesn’t need a One Wish Willow to make someone a stranger inside their own skin. For many survivors, it isn’t a horror film, but a mirror. A mirror reflecting something they have known for a long time.
This piece is about what sexual assault truly takes from a person, not just in the moment, but for the rest of their life. It is for survivors who recognized themselves in Nikki long before I put it into words. It is for everyone who has spent years living inside a body that was treated as someone else’s to decide.
Where the water used to reach
In Obsession, Bear never asks Nikki. This might be the most devastating thing about the film, not the gore or the scary soundtrack, but the terrifying familiarity of how often it occurs in real life. He wished for her love, took the decision entirely out of her hands and placed it somewhere she couldn’t reclaim. The moment consent was removed, Nikki began to change shape, the way a coastline changes shape when a storm tears through it without warning. A storm surge doesn’t erode a coastline evenly. It takes, in one violent motion, what erosion would have taken decades to do. And when the storm finally passes, the coastline isn’t restored to its original shape. This is what happened to Nikki: the version of her that existed before Bear’s wish, the life she had before he took away her autonomy, doesn’t return once the wish is made. It also doesn’t return when Bear passes away. What’s left is a different shoreline entirely, reshaped by something she never agreed to let in.
Sexual assault works the same way. It takes away the survivor’s right to decide what happens to their own body, and in that single motion, reshapes something that could have stayed the same for a lifetime. Like a coastline after a storm, the person underneath doesn’t go back to their original shape just because time passes or the ocean calms down. People may walk along that new shoreline for years, witnessing its new shape. People may see the new versions which survivors have become,calling it recovery and healing, because that’s what it looks like from the outside. But no one who walks that shoreline afterward can tell where the old coast used to be, except the land itself. No one who witnesses the new versions of survivors can measure exactly what was lost, except the survivors themselves. Only they know where the old shoreline stood, a knowledge healing can soften but never completely erase.
The reshaping rarely announces itself as a scream. It’s closer to the sound of tides still moving after the storm has passed - a quiet, persistent presence reminding the land that what was taken cannot be fully returned. No one teaches a coast how to reclaim itself from a storm it never invited in, and no one teaches a shore what to do with the version of itself the storm left behind. There is only the slow, uncertain work of learning what shape remains once the ocean finally goes still.
Eventually the tide comes back, and the water settles - but it settles into a shore that no longer holds the memory of what it once was. Just like a coastline reshaped by a storm, survivors are left with a version of themselves they no longer recognize. A version shaped more by what was taken from them than by what they chose to become. Survivors are left to live inside that shape anyway, inside a body they can no longer call fully their own. The land doesn’t get to wait until it feels complete again before the tide comes in, before people start walking alongside its new shape. It just carries on being a shoreline, hollow in places only it can feel, continuing a life inside a self that no longer feels entirely its own.
To reclaim what was taken is not the same as getting back.
Aftermath, not ending
By the end, Nikki was left in a house that no longer feels like hers, with a man who is finally silent. The storm is gone, but indifferent to what it leaves behind - there’s no relief in an ending like this. Nikki became a shore left standing in the wreckage, sorting through a devastation that was never hers to create. This is the cruelty of what she survived: the storm gets an ending, the shore only gets an aftermath. Trauma doesn’t leave when danger does. It settles into the ordinary hours of a life that’s expected to continue, into the body that no longer feels like home.
A shoreline doesn’t get to choose how it responds to what the storm leaves behind. Some reach towards the tide instinctively, seeking an intimacy that feels familiar even when it hurts, confusing the current’s pull for something like affection. Others recoil entirely, refusing every wave that approaches, becoming so guarded that even gentle water feels like another threat. Both are what happens when something is taken by force, and the body is left trying to make sense of an intrusion against its will. Nights don’t always stay peaceful either - dreams interrupted by the storm returning uninvited, memory replaying itself in fragments that turn sleep restless. There’s a subtle blame that settles in too, a voice insisting the shore should’ve known better, should’ve been stronger and sturdier - though no coastline has ever had that power. The storm gets to end, the shore doesn’t. It goes on living inside the wreckage, enduring a consequence that the world assumes is already over.
So let this be offered softly, to Nikki, and to anyone who has lived through their own version of this storm: the urge to reach for closeness that once pulled them under, the coastline that stopped trusting any water at all, the sleepless nights where the storm returns uninvited, and the voice that keeps insisting they should’ve known better. Not because surviving felt like strength, but because it was the unglamorous thing that carried them this far.
Someday, may there be something even gentler than forgiveness, something closer to love. Not for the shoreline that existed before the storm, but for the one still standing now, slowly learning how to embrace the water without flinching against it. The old coastline won’t return, though that doesn’t mean every tide has to carry the same weight the last one did. May sunlight keep reaching the shore regardless, unconcerned with what it has endured, and offering itself freely either way. May the shore still know how to be tender, still catch the sun and welcome the ocean as it always has. May it still become a place worth coming home to, a place worth returning. Not because the storm left no trace, but because the shore never stopped choosing itself, through every wave that followed.
