In Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, Richard Armitage plays a dwarf king fixated on his family’s stolen treasure. Now, in steamy melodrama Obsession (Netflix, from Thursday, April 13th), we finally get to see his crown jewels – though you’ll soon wish for a magic ring that will make the whole thing disappear.
Obsession has been heralded as marking the return of the “erotic thriller” a genre from the 1980 and early 1990s in which a workaday murder mystery was padded out with heavy breathing and extraneous nudity.
These films inevitably starred Michael Douglas as a middle-aged man drawn into a deadly game of brooding and bonking (if Douglas was in rehab for sex addiction there was the option to cast Jeremy Irons instead). And at their best, they achieved a grand Guignol silliness.
Here, after all, was the milieu that gave us the problematically boiled bunny and Sharon Stone with that ice pick under the bed. At their worst, though, they were a blur of writhing limbs and gratuitous bum shots that could really make you regret having such a full lunch. They were so serious yet so hilarious.
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In all the worst ways, Obsession harks back to the heyday of the form. Adapted from the same novel that inspired the 1992 Jeremy Irons-Juliette Binoche howler Damage, it pairs Armitage and Enniscorthy actor Charlie Murphy as doomed lovers sucked into a whirlpool of mutual desire and destruction – with results that are about as titillating as a nude fun run through a hail shower.
Armitage plays William Farrow, a “brilliant” surgeon – does TV ever do mediocre surgeons? – whose outwardly happy marriage papers over a pit of unstated desire. Murphy is Anna Barton, enigmatic girlfriend of Farrow’s son Jay (Rish Shah).
I say “enigmatic”. But it would be more accurate to suggest that she acts like a character from a mid-1990s video game. She and Farrow meet at a reception – she begins by ogling him across the hall, he then takes an olive and “suggestively” pops it into her mouth. No real person would behave this way and Murphy struggles with a script disinterested in furnishing her character with even the hint of an internal life.
Jay wants to marry Anna. And though she extracts a certain frosty satisfaction from his company, she’s also getting frisky on the QT with his dad. This is where Obsession truly flops. Erotic thrillers live or die by their sex scenes and, as they cavort on a variety of hardwood flooring, Anna and William look as if they are freezing, bored and mentally ticking off a checklist of chores for the weekend.
Their non-chemistry howls through the show like a hurricane with an ailing libido. As they huff and puff you expect Anna to coquettishly put her finger to Farrow’s lips and wonder aloud if she remembered to take out the recycling. Farrow, meanwhile, appears forever on the brink of putting his back out and elsewhere seems more interested in sex with his exercise bike than with Anna.
For an erotic thriller, Obsession falls short of steamy then. There’s not much of thriller here either. Nobody dies and the closest we get to a mystery involves Anna’s need for humiliation. Her relationship with Farrow has a strong S&M component and there is a suggestion that she finds comfort in pain. It is an interesting idea denied the time or empathy it merits.
Irish viewers will spare a thought for Murphy, who, on the heels of dire Channel 5 thriller Deadline, finds herself starring in another British turkey. She has real presence and does her best with dialogue such as “kneel and I’ll give myself to you”. Alas, Obsession is a waste of her talents – a reminder that, along with nu-metal and Jennifer Aniston’s fringe, the erotic thriller is a 1990s fad best forgotten.
