Obsessed (Screen Gems, Rainforest Films, 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Lifetime showed yet another movie cut to their formula, even though it was made for theatrical release and wasn’t the product of one of the minor companies that “feed” Lifetime its usual material. It was called Obsessed and was made in 2009 by Screen Gems, the subsidiary of Columbia that originally was their shorts department in the 1930’s and 1940’s (the Three Stooges made most of their famous two-reelers for them). With the advent of television and the decision of the major studios in the mid-1950’s to stop resisting it and start selling to it, Columbia made Screen Gems their TV label. Just how a movie with at least semi-major stars like Idris Elba and Beyoncé (who in 2009 wasn’t quite the icon she became later but was already a major draw in both music and films; this was three years after her stunning performance in Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls, which was overshadowed only by Jennifer Hudson’s even more incandescent one in a showier role!) got put out on Columbia’s TV label is a mystery. But the plot (the writer was David Loughery and the director was Steve Shill, which sounds like a bad joke waiting to be told) was more or less pure Lifetime. Derek Charles (Idris Elba) is a hot-shot young executive at a Los Angeles-based investment firm called Gage Bendix. Significantly, he’s also the only Black person we see at their office. Derek has been married for over three years to Sharon (Beyoncé, still using both her names and billed as Beyoncé Knowles) and they’ve had a son named Kyle (played, in a common casting dodge to avoid working a child illegally, by identical twins Nathan and Nicolas Myers), but Sharon worked as his assistant at Gage Bendix before they got married and the implication is they started dating while they were still colleagues at work.

A newly hired office temp, Lisa Sheridan (Ali Larter), is bound and determined from the moment she shows up to make history repeat itself and seduce Derek away from Sharon. At the office Christmas party – at which, by the firm’s long-standing policy, spouses are prohibited – Lisa corners Derek in the men’s room and literally tries to rape him. He fends her off but she tries again, sneaking into his car as he tries to leave after work and throwing off her coat to reveal herself clad only in sexy underwear underneath. Later at a New Year’s corporate retreat (these executives have so many wild parties and retreats one wonders when they get any work done!) she books a room in the hotel and tells everyone she, not Sharon, is Derek’s wife. Derek finds her in his bed, primed and ready for sexual action, but once again he’s successfully able to rebuff her. Only Lisa’s antics reach the top echelons of Gage Bendix and Derek realizes she’s potentially going to cost him both his marriage and his job. Derek tries to explain everything to Sharon but she won’t listen. There’s a bizarre scene in which a woman police detective named Reese (Christine Lahti, whose name I long made fun of as “Christine Lah-ti-dah”) is interrogating Derek about Lisa, and Sharon is right there in the room. Reese offers to question Derek out of the presence of his wife, but Derek insists he has nothing to hide, though as Reese continues her questioning Sharon is shocked at how far the affair went (even though both he and we know that there wasn’t one, at least in terms of actual extra-relational sexual activity) and so strongly overreacts she literally throws him out of their house. Once Lisa finally understands that she doesn’t have a chance with Derek because he isn’t going to break up with his wife over her, she sneaks into the Charles’s home and tricks their babysitter into letting her be alone with Kyle. Like so many Lifetime villainesses before and since, her intent seems to be to kidnap Kyle, though in the end she only moves Kyle from one part of the house to another and scares the shit out of Sharon until Sharon finally finds him.

In the final scenes, Sharon and Lisa confront each other in the house and we get the Chekhovian payoff of an early scene in which Derek warned Sharon of loose floorboards in the attic. Sure enough, while Sharon and Lisa are having their bitch fight in the attic, Lisa falls through the loose floorboards and Sharon actually tries to rescue her. But Lisa doesn’t trust her and fails to grab Sharon’s hand, and ultimately in a series of scenes director Shill stretches out to absurd lengths, Lisa gets impaled by a chandelier à la The Phantom of the Opera and then falls headlong through the glass surface of the Charles’s coffee table. (I suspect writer Loughery had seen the 1989 dark comedy The War of the Roses, in which Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner played a divorcing couple whose conflict becomes so intense they literally kill themselves on a falling chandelier in their former home. It’s the movie in which Danny DeVito, playing the divorce lawyer for one of them, is actually the voice of reason for a change!) Obsessed is an O.K. movie, better acted than some on the Lifetime network – I particularly liked the character of Patrick (Matthew Humphries), a more-or-less “out” Gay man at the Gage Malone office who laments on one occasion, “All the good ones are either married or straight” (an interesting rewrite of the famous old joke, “All the good ones are either married or Gay,” which in the era of same-sex marriage became, “All the good ones are either married, Gay or both”) – and Charles and I both had some interesting reactions to Beyoncé’s performance. We both placed her midway on the scale of women singers trying to be actresses, from the heights of Barbra Streisand to the depths of Whitney Houston (who in The Bodyguard showed she couldn’t even play herself convincingly), though since this was three years after Dreamgirls (in which Beyoncé had proven she could act), it’s clear that what was holding her back this time was a clichéd script that had her turn against her husband way too quickly and completely and offered her precious little with which to work.