by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. I watched last night’s Lifetime movie, which
actually turned out to be almost a year old — its “premiere” was on September
3, 2018 and I had downloaded its imdb.com page last January in preparation for
a rerun showing then but hadn’t actually watched it. The film was called His
Perfect Obsession and was produced by the
team of Pierre David and Tom Berry — which meant we could expect elements of
Gothic horror as part of the mix along with the usual Lifetime elements of
cheating husbands, separated wives, hunky hangers-on, teenage daughters (and
their boyfriends) and sinister stalkers. The separated wife is Allison Jones
(Ariane Zucker, top-billed), who returns to the small town where she grew up
following the death of her aunt. She works as a fashion buyer — the sort of
person who takes women with more money than brains out to high-end stores and
tells them what clothing to purchase for what occasion — and she’s confronted
with the task of raising her teenage daughter Abigail (Ali Skovbye) as a single
parent. His Perfect Obsession
scores one point for originality in writer-director Alexander Carrière’s
script: Abigail has recently gone blind, product of the side effect of an
asthma medication that went horribly awry — though Ali Skovbye’s unconvincing
attempt to convey blindness consists of waving a blind-person’s cane in front
of her as if it’s a metal detector and she’s looking for buried treasure, and
giving the camera a blank stare in all her close-ups.
The stalker is Bart McGregor
(Brendan Murray), and with his thick black-rimmed glasses he looks less like
the usual Lifetime drop-dead gorgeous male villain than a cross between former
Senator Al Franken and the similarly obsessed nerd the late Robin Williams
played in one of his least-known films, One Hour Photo. It seems that Bart lusted after Allison when both
were in high school together, and now that she’s returned home he’s renewed his
determination to seduce her and get her to live with him whether she wants that or not. We’re briefly introduced to
another potential suitor for Allison, real estate agent Lance Lancaster (Seann
Gallagher), who shows up to Allison’s aunt’s home thinking Allison still plans
to sell it and asking for the listing; they go to the big maple-syrup pouring
at the Sugar Shack restaurant (which seems to be the only option the residents
of this generic New England small town — “played” by Ottawa, Canada — have for
entertainment), much to Bart’s disappointment. Then Bart hacks Lance’s Facebook
page and finds that he’s into dating 20-year-olds and taking revealing photos
of himself with his latest conquests; he sends these to Allison and that’s the
end of that. But Bart, who’s already eliminated Allison’s husband Wyatt (Tomas
Chovanek) after she threw him out for continuing an affair he had promised her
he’d stop, ends up with another rival: Ed Sullivan (and yes, it’s jarring to
hear him referred to by the name of a celebrity whose Sunday night variety show
was almost required viewing in the 1950’s and 1960’s; whatever enduring fame he
has comes largely from having introduced the Beatles to U.S. audiences, which
as I noted in my blog post on the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan Show appearances is like taking the Revolution to the
citadel of the ancien regime — as
if the French Revolution had begun with the masses storming Versailles instead
of the Bastille), an attractive if not particularly hunky actor who alas is not
identified on the imdb.com page for this movie.
Ed runs the local bar and he
meets Allison when his son Shane (Mikael Conde) starts taking an interest in
Abigail — giving us the impression that the film is heading for an ending that
isn’t really incestuous but looks an awful lot like it, in which Allison would
pair up with Ed and her daughter would wind up with Ed’s son. That doesn’t
happen — though Carrière at least hints at it — and the romantic intrigues just
take our attention away from the most powerful parts of the movie, the
confrontations between Bart and his (presumably widowed) mother Cecelia (Deborah
Grover). It seems that Carrière is enough of a worshiper at the shrine of St.
Alfred Hitchcock that he’s going to have his psycho stalker motivated by his
love-hate relationship with his equally crazy mom, and that midway through the
film he’s going to have Bart knock off Cecelia and thereby turn this from a Strangers
on a Train knockoff (psycho under the
domination of a living mother) to a Psycho knockoff (psycho under the psychological domination of his dead mother — though she’s still a corporeal presence,
albeit as an urn full of cremains instead of a stuffed body hidden in a fruit
cellar). Alas, Carrière is yet another director who thinks he’s Hitchcock and isn’t, and his film proceeds to
the expected climax in the deserted mountain cabin (this time it’s part of a
ranch Bart bought with Cecelia’s money years before), where he’s taken Allison
and Abigail after he’s kidnapped them. He’s stocked the place with all their
favorite products, including tampons (one of the film’s nicer scenes is Shane
getting suspicious when he sees Bart, a single male, in the supermarket buying
tampons), matching their brand preferences because he’s somehow got a key to
their house and has been letting himself in any time he likes, including one
scene in which he grabs Allison’s used bath towel and literally takes it to bed
(her bed) with him.
There’s a lot
of fooforaw about Bart’s gun (a semi-automatic pistol) and his attempt to
entrap Allison and Abigail by leaving bullets that are the wrong caliber for
it, so even if they steal the gun (which they do since he hides it singularly
obviously in his fishing creel) they won’t be able to use it. (This was
preceded by a shot of Bart at home counting out his bullets and laying them out
on a table — which after a weekend in which there’d been two major mass shooting incidents, in El Paso, Texas on
Saturday and Dayton, Ohio on Sunday, no doubt took on a considerably more
macabre cast than Alexander Carrière had intended!) Ed and Shane figure out
where Bart’s deserted cabin is by searching the real-estate records from when
he bought it, and they run down there to find Allison and Abigail confronting
Bart, who’s about to shoot Allison when Abigail shoots him — it’s already established that she’s not only
developed extra-sensitive hearing after becoming blind but she’s become a
virtual Sherlock Holmes in her ability to make deductions on olfactory as well
as auditory evidence — and all ends well. Carrière gets some nice atmospherics
into this odd tale, but it still remains just a few fresh wrinkles on the usual
Lifetime prune, though at least the acting is better than that in the V. C.
Andrews Heaven cycle (mainly
because at least most of Carrière’s dialogue is conceivable as the way people
actually talk) and Bart, like the Hitchcock psychos that were his characters’
prototypes, underplays the
craziness and is chillingly effective — though he could have done more in a
script by someone like Christine Conradt who would have given us more of his
backstory and made him a character of real dimension.
