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There was a time in the late Eighties and early Nineties when you couldn’t move for Michael Douglas’ buttocks. They were everywhere you looked. Bouncing up and down several feet from his shaggy hair-do, and somehow creating box office gold.
Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct made squillions, and brought a slew of imitators in a genre known as erotic thrillers. Who can forget the ‘highs’ of this genre like Body of Evidence, starring Madonna and a mortified Willem Defoe, or Colour Of Night with Bruce Willis and a terrified Jane March or Sea of Love with Al Pacino and an amused Ellen Barkin – all with variations on theme: sexy women are psychos!
Bunny boilers became the common parlance from these films, which were built on the idea of a scorned woman coming after a weak-willed but ultimately decent family guy. It’s fair to say they didn’t bother too much with the point of view of the female protagonists and served instead as moral warnings or AIDS metaphors or just witch-burning for popcorn munchers.
Now however, the erotic thriller is back in a big way, with a new emphasis on the female gaze. A new TV version of Fatal Attraction is on its way (Michael Douglas’s buttocks not likely to feature, sadly), but set to steal its thunder is Obsession, a new Netflix adaptation of the novel Damage by Josephine Hart, which was previously made into a film by Louis Malle in 1991, starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche.
Obsession is about an affair between a married surgeon, William (Richard Armitage) and his son’s girlfriend, Anna (Charlie Murphy). It is a case of lust at first sight, but with Anna very much in control. Indeed, the obsession of the title is not Anna’s – she is not the classic destructive femme fatale – it’s William’s. He has little of her self-possession and is unable to accept the rules of the clandestine relationship; he wants more, wants to possess her, even if it costs him everything.
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Unlike the book and Malle’s version, this new adaptation, written by award-winning playwright Morgan Lloyd-Malcolm and Benji Walters, very much puts the female perspective at its heart, not only looking at Anna’s dark past and possible motivations, but showing how her desires revolve around the interplay of power, on her own terms. Therefore the much touted BDSM in the show is simply a means to explore sexual dynamics rather than just being some kinky shit for the mums and dads.
Armitage is on fine form as the troubled and desperate William, and Indira Varma as his wife Ingrid has some scene-stealing moments as her life eventually shatters. Yet this is Murphy’s series – her Anna combines strength and vulnerability, operating with an erotic power from a staggering amount of ‘damage’, which is utterly convincing.
Directed by Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa, the entire series operates with a stately sophistication which boils few bunnies but instead hits notes of Hitchcockian suspense. Most obviously, the show is reminiscent of Vertigo, as one man’s obsession with a woman destroys his mind and his life. The difference here is that, the implicit misogyny in Hitchcock is replaced with a degree of understanding: the male protagonist destroys himself, but it’s hardly just this treacherous woman’s fault.
Unlike most erotic thrillers, Obsession manages to be both erotic and thrilling. Perhaps there’s life in this throwback genre after all.