Movie Review - Fatal Affair (2020)

The title is supposed to be a homage to Fatal Attraction (1987), which is a bit of a classic in terms of erotic thrillers. It's also become a cult favorite in some regards. In the 20 years since, so many films have tried to copy it. So much so, Fatal Attraction has become a genre in and of itself. Some movie companies or networks churn them out like a factory churns out widgets, and some filmmakers are like warehouse workers on the assembly line. One of those factory workers would be writer-director Peter Sullivan. If you look at Sullivan's filmography, he's done over a dozen films with Christmas in the title or reference Christmas in some way. A chunk of those films are for the Hallmark Channel, which is itself a factory for churning out Christmas flicks. A few of Sullivan's films have also been for the Lifetime channel, which has also been a factory for films about women who are in danger from obsessive and abusive men. That Lifetime factory is basically a gender reversal of the Fatal Attraction formula.

That gender-reversal idea is one that goes back further than the 1980's. That gender-reversal idea actually isn't a gender-reversal. The idea of a "fatal attraction" originally started with films about women who are in danger from obsessive and abusive men. If one wants to really get technical, the idea goes all the way back to things like Nosferatu (1922), which is a horror film. Arguably, most horrors have that basic idea as their premise. This idea underpins slasher flicks like Halloween (1978). However, this idea leads more toward stalker films like Cape Fear (1962) or Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965), as well as other neo-noir films of the 60's that linked revenge and sexual desire or sexual domination where a man wanted to possess and control a woman. When it comes to these films about stalking, there have been some interesting riffs or interpretations like Single White Female (1992) and Greta (2019), but, in general, they can be pretty lame and the factory product from Lifetime have been some of the worst offenders because in part they feel like such factory product, lacking in creativity. However, the past five years have tried to inject some creativity by instead having the stalker and the stalked be predominantly white people, these stalker films now are populated with people of color, particularly Black people.

Nia Long (The Best Man and Soul Food) stars as Ellie Warren, a lawyer living in the San Francisco area. She's been married for about 20 years. She has a daughter with her husband who is now in college. Now that she and her husband have an empty nest, they want to change their lives. They decide to move out of the city and find a home in the suburbs, but still along the coast. Ellie also wants to leave her big city firm and start her own smaller practice. She doesn't have any problems, but she has noticed somewhat of a lull in her relationship with her husband where the two aren't really connecting. Some of it is probably due to being married for a long time and her husband also having been in a car accident from which he's still recovering.

Omar Epps (Love & Basketball and Higher Learning) co-stars as David Hammond, a tech consultant or hacker who is hired by law firms to investigate people and dig up dirt. He comes to work at Ellie's law firm in the city. He reminds her that they knew each other back in high school, but they haven't seen each other in 20 years. Currently, David is in therapy because of a court order to deal with his anger management issues. He's also dealing with the death of his ex-wife. He then begins to obsess over Ellie. She considers having an affair with him, but she doesn't. This doesn't matter to David. He concocts a fantasy that he and Ellie are together and pursues her in very crazy fashion, threatening to ruin her friendships and her marriage.

Sullivan's film for Netflix that he made in the previous year, which was released in the same month, was Secret Obsession (2019). Yes, it's a film in this same genre of stalker flick, but it has a plot that's a little bit inventive and also has a bit of mystery surrounding it. The mystery isn't overly clever, but it has an element that elevates or at least separates it somewhat. The woman in danger was an Asian woman, so that differentiated it as well. This film, however, doesn't have anything that differentiates it from many of the other flicks in the genre. There's nothing that elevates it either.

This is basically girl-meets-boy, boy-is-crazy, girl-tries-to-get-away-from-boy, boy-stalks-girl, boy-kills-people and girl-has-to-fight-boy. That's the formula for most of these factory products. Sullivan wrote and directed one of these factory products nearly a decade ago, as well as many others in between, but the one he made nearly a decade ago called Hidden Away (2013), which is another right off the same assembly line, but, at least that Lifetime film had something that elevated it somewhat. The final scene, which is the showdown between the woman and her stalker was an exciting set-piece, featuring action in an unlikely place, namely a ski-lift. This film doesn't have a set-piece like that. The final showdown here ironically ends the same way as Hidden Away, but the mechanics aren't that exciting, intricate or all that thrilling. Speaking of Hidden Away, it featured an actor, Ivan Sergei, a tall, handsome guy who's been in several of these stalker films. Sergei's most famous was Mother, May I Sleep With Danger (1996).

Former baseball player, Stephen Bishop also co-stars as Marcus Warren, the husband to Ellie and father to her daughter. He's the architect who was injured in a car accident and likes to play golf. Like Sergei, Bishop is another tall, handsome guy who has starred in other stalker film. Bishop was in 'Til Death Do Us Part (2017), which is more of a riff of Sleeping With the Enemy (1991), which is another take on these stalker films. In Bishop's previous stalker film, he was the crazy guy. Here, instead, he's the normal one, but, arguably, the film doesn't really give us enough of Marcus' perspective or point-of-view, as other normal people are in this genre. Clearly, there's nothing to interrogate when it comes to Marcus. The film establishes that Ellie and Marcus' marriage is perfect, so Marcus' perspective isn't needed.

The film is about what a woman does with still having it all and still having a perfect life, which is essentially the situation in Fatal Attraction. In that film, it's all about the infidelity of men or some men's insatiable nature. It could be about how men will gamble with their lives over the prospect of getting sex, even adulterous sex, if they think they can get away with it. That's not the case here. It's fine if there's no interrogation of Marcus' inner life, but there isn't much interrogation of Ellie's inner life. When Ellie's almost affair is exposed, Marcus confronts her, but there's no kind of interrogation or true delving as to why Ellie made the mistake she made.

There's certainly no interrogation of David's inner life either. In Fatal Attraction, there's some kind of understanding of the insane grievance. Yet here, David is just dismissed as a psychopath. At least, in The Perfect Guy (2015), the crazy stalker in that film had something to anchor his psychopathy. Here, David invents his affair with Ellie out of whole cloth. They don't even have sex, so there's no nuance and no gray area.

Most of these films typically don't have gray area. An exception to that is a film called Rubberneck (2013), which brings a lot more nuance and gray area to the Fatal Attraction genre. Yet, without those nuances, the best that can be done is to latch onto some other aspect that might make the film more engaging. One aspect might be to make the so-called fatal attraction between a same-sex couple. Such examples include Single White Female (1992), The Cable Guy (1996) and Cut Snake (2015). One aspect is the naughty teacher-student relationship, which was exemplified in The Boy Next Door (2015). Another aspect is religious fundamentalism, which we got a little in Missionary (2015).

This film has no aspect like that. One could say the aspect is something about an affluent Black family, but the film goes nowhere with that. Even a trashy film like Addicted (2014) still had a discernible aspect, that of sex addiction with which it grappled. This film grapples with nothing.

Rated TV-14.

Running Time: 1 hr. and 29 mins.

Available on Netflix.