Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Obsessed

(2009)

I’m tempted just to dismiss this in one sentence as the stupid, noxious piece of shit that it is, and get on with my life. But let me say just a few words about what makes it so bad …
What it is, is Fatal Attraction without the original sin. That is, Michael Douglas did fuck Glenn Close. Her reaction was, shall we say, a bit extreme, but she did have at least that starting point to get pissed at him. In a way, he did bring it on himself. Here, Idris Elba (an Englishman born to parents from Ghana and Sierra Leone, and I never would have guessed) is innocent of anything except not telling his wife in a timely fashion the details of how he is being stalked, for no reason we can see, by a psychotic woman. I can certainly forgive him for that; I suspect almost all men would react the same way. “You see, darling, this fabulously beautiful woman just can’t keep her hands off me. She cornered me in the men’s room, and she got in my car and stripped. Had to shove her out onto the pavement on her lovely white ass …” Uh-huh. That would play real well. And he’s proven right, because when the wife, Bouncy Knolls (sp?), does learn of the non-affair, she refuses to listen to his side of the story.
MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD
But the real problem is that, when it becomes clear how loony and dangerous this woman is, everybody does the stupidest thing possible, all the time. I can’t stand that. People that stupid deserve to die. So be sure to forget to arm the burglar alarm you just had installed. When you know she’s in the house, be careful not to turn on any lights or to arm yourself with so much as a paring knife as you pursue her up into the spooky attic. And most of all, after she’s fallen through the attic ceiling and is dangling from a rafter over a 40-foot drop, be sure to lean way over and offer your hand to pull her back up. This is the woman who kidnapped your child. Me? I’d stomp on her fingers. If that makes me a bad person, then so be it. But I think that most people would at least sit back and let gravity and exhaustion do the deed for them.