And so even though Derek is innocent, she views him as guilty. If Derek is innocent, then once Larter’s vamp starts to invade his private space and pretend that they’ve had a mad affair, why doesn’t he just clear things up by, you know, talking to his wife? The bizarre, paranoid premise of Obsessed is that Knowles - and, by extension, any good stand-by-your-man wife these days - is more than just loyal she’s a high-maintenance Force To Be Reckoned With. The movie wants to tease us with intimations of a steamy biracial liaison it just doesn’t want to actually go there. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Obsessed regurgitates Fatal Attraction‘s adultery plot, minus any actual adultery, because the director, TV veteran Steve Shill, and the screenwriter, David Loughery, are copping out. He’s guilty of nothing more than fatal flirtation. As for Derek, he has none of the fascinating culpability of Michael Douglas in the earlier film.
Larter, as the office temptress who just about sexually assaults our hero, is a total psycho obsessed - and unhinged - from the get-go, and Knowles’ Sharon (who met her husband when she was his assistant) is jealous before she’s even laid eyes on her rival. It’s doubtful that Obsessed will stick in the popular imagination for more than two weeks, because the movie is borderline ludicrous, and it jams its characters into rigid slots. Glenn Close, as the other woman scorned, may have been playing a feminist Medusa, but her rage at being tossed away after an affair spoke to a new world in which women, leveraging their power, had rewritten the rules of attraction.
Obsessed is an obvious gloss on Fatal Attraction, a movie that has lived in the popular imagination for more than two decades because of how splendidly it squeezed Hitchcockian thrills out of an addled, sexually complicated, real-life messiness.
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