Obsessed is ostensibly a “sexy thriller” in which a deranged office temp (Ali Larter) seeks to seduce Idris Elba away from his wife, Beyoncé Knowles. Poor acting and eye-rolling dialogue are to be expected in service of soap operatic beautiful-people-doing-ugly-things. (See Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Crush). Even entering with those expectations and allowances, Obsessed is shockingly bad.

Obsessed should be the central text in a course study on the evils of focus-testing: a cautionary tale about a movie that was rewritten to death and, even in death, probably rewritten again. At some point, it was decided that Obsessed should be scrubbed of any moral ambiguity or turpitude, granting it the ignoble position of being Fatal Attraction to the church set. No one ever does anything really wrong, and it is boring, a fatal wound for a genre whose primary conceit is lip-biting voyeurism. No less troubling is the disjointed plot, which is haunted by the ghostly presence of prior scripts (“I bet this scene originally led to something”). Finally, it simply changes voice, evidently based on a last minute change of mind about whom the main character should be. The result is a guilty pleasure with no pleasure and no guilt; a corpse with its teeth, heart and brain forcibly removed, leaving only a gummy and pathetic tragedy.

Tags: drama, Sexy, thriller