Netflix’s new erotic thriller, Obsession, begins with a silver fox engaging in some complicated, presumably erotic surgery. He’s not a literal silver fox, for that would be hideous, but a figurative one named William (Richard Armitage). William is a hunky surgeon, which is one of the many types of hunk you need for an erotic thriller if you’re playing by the rules Paul Verhoeven set down in the 1980s.
The word “obsession” then looms at us through the darkness and eerie music plays. It’s erotic drama time. Here’s the pitch: William, a posh Englishman, is in the thrall of a manipulative femme fatale named Anna played by Ireland’s own Charlie Murphy who is pretending to be English. “Good woman yourself, Charlie,” is the only appropriate response to this, followed by a few bars of A Nation Once Again.
Now, another thing that’s worth mentioning about Anna is that she is William’s son’s girlfriend. This, I think you’ll agree, is very erotic. Yes, it’s the 1980s again, baby. A new Fatal Attraction adaptation is debuting next week on Paramount Plus. Elsewhere on Netflix, Sex/Life is playing. “Erotic drama” is no longer a nickname your friends had for you behind your back. It’s a genre once again. You now have my permission to sing A Genre Once Again (and listen to the excellent Erotic Eighties series of Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This).
Obsession is adapted by Morgan Lloyd-Malcolm from Josephine Hart’s novel Damage. It quickly becomes clear that the reason they made William a celebrity surgeon is that for much of the show he stands looking dazed and slack-jawed at the edge of social gatherings, gazing across a room at Anna while other people have conversations across him. There’s a danger that if he didn’t have a high-powered job, we’d think Anna was taking advantage of an older man with a bad concussion.
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What do women want? A hunky idiot without a past, that’s what
William’s jaw goes slack from the first moment he and Anna catch eyes across a crowded room. They meet at a bar counter and speak breathily and gruntily at one another for a bit before he feeds her an olive with his fingers. This, I think you’ll agree, is fierce erotic altogether. He goes to a gym and furiously cycles a stationary bike, which is a great euphemism and one I hope takes off. “Off to furiously cycle the stationary bike,” we’ll be saying come month’s end.
William goes and does another operation (it’s unclear if he washed his hands) and then he gets an erotic text from Anna on his erotic phone inviting him to her friend’s erotic apartment
Anna visits William’s family in their fancy family house in the countryside. William makes an erotic drink for Anna erotically. Over dinner Anna and William glare at one another lustily while no one else in the family notices. The main thing I’m learning from this is that having an affair is way easier than I thought.
William goes and does another operation (it’s unclear if he washed his hands) and then he gets an erotic text from Anna on his erotic phone inviting him to her friend’s erotic apartment. He goes there and they both have very serious, uncomfortable-looking sex on the wooden floor tiles and I find myself thinking erotic thoughts like: “Where did they get those floor tiles? Is that a parquet floor?”
By episode two, it’s clear that the intimacy co-ordinator has seized power and that the director is tied up in a press somewhere, because we open with Anna and William having uncomfortable looking BDSM-adjacent sex against the wall and then facing each other while kneeling on the floor. Then they just lie on the floor naked as William drips cold water from a handkerchief on to Anna because apparently they don’t have a bed or a shower.
She tells him a terrible secret from her past and he rips a page from her sex diary, about which he will presumably ride the stationary bike later on
To be honest, this is all an excellent way of showing the strengths and weaknesses of the property and I had a lot of thoughts about how I’d decorate it. My main thought: more cushions. At one point William rests his chin against an arse (presumably Anna’s; it’s confusingly shot) because even he wants a cushion. He’s in his 50s. This is the deep subtext that I’m taking away from these sex scenes: cushions are erotic.
They also have a discussion about the “rules” of their various sex games. Light BDSM is big with people who love bureaucracy. There are a lot of rules. Anna even writes up reports in a diary. A little later, William is furiously riding the stationary bike (literally) when she texts him to visit again. When he does so, she tells him a terrible secret from her past and he rips a page from her sex diary, about which he will presumably ride the stationary bike later on.
He then follows Anna and his son Jay to Paris where they are spending a romantic weekend. William feels he can add something to this. He watches them from across the road, then contacts Anna and they have frantic sex in a nearby alleyway. This doesn’t happen as often as you might think in Emily in Paris. But there’s more! When Anna and Jay leave Paris, William books into their hotel room and proceeds to furiously cycle the stationary bike (figuratively), by which I mean he has energetic sex with the bed while sniffing a cushion and weeping.
This is, frankly, the most erotic scene in the whole show so far. It again betrays William’s deep desire for cushions and back support. I hope for a few moments that impressionable, sad-eyed William is going to transfer his lust for Anna to this cushion, turning their dangerous love triangle into a more equitable, sex-positive and frankly comfortable love square. But he does not.
Although William doesn’t return to London wearing a T-shirt that says: “I went all the way to Paris and had energetic sex with a bed while sniffing a cushion and weeping”, he might as well do, because his wife suspects something is up. Perhaps it is the way he continuously gawps at his son’s girlfriend. Perhaps it is the amount of time he spends on the stationary bike. The suspicion grows after Anna and Jay become engaged and William starts receiving mysterious texts from a stranger who claims to know his secrets (the cushion thing, probably). This will unravel in the subsequent episodes with all the heteronormative, sex-terrified melodrama of a 1980s erotic thriller and not, sadly, the devil-may-care insouciance of a 1970s sex comedy.
If you’re looking for an excellent show about obsessive behaviour please watch, instead, Beef (Netflix) created by Lee Sung Jin. The title is a reference not to cattle’s “food name” but to the slang term for acrimonious disagreements. It features Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two stressed-out strangers who end up in an absurdly escalating dispute over a minor traffic incident in sun-scorched South California. It tells a darkly comic and surprisingly tender story about economic insecurity and social expectation, all filtered through powerful, ragefully-vulnerable performances from Yeun and Wong and the extended cast. It’s deeply original and just very, very good.
