Certain questions arise during the eight hours spent giving the reboot of Fatal Attraction a fair retrial. One is: “What the hell is going on now?” Another is the question it thinks it’s answering by existing at all: “Is it possible to treat the sexism in an inherently sexist erotic thriller like a rotten tooth that can be extracted?” The answer in this case is no – with a side of: “And why on earth would you want to?”
The original Fatal Attraction came out in 1987. Back then, the good lawyer fighting the good fight who ends up having a steamy weekend affair with the bad woman – or the career woman as we defined her back then, shudder – was regarded as “a powerful cautionary tale” (the New York Times) for married men. “Whatever you do, don’t shag the crazy lady!” When it came to the brutal bathtub climax, men jumped to their feet during screenings and screamed: “Kill the bitch!” A new phrase to describe the horrors enacted by a vengeful woman spurned by her lover was born: bunny boiler. Glenn Close, who played Alex, came to regret the role but at the time it was a huge success: nominated for six Oscars, an instant classic. Everyone watched it. I did. Many times.
Fatal Attraction redux is an archetypal 2023 watch, in that it thinks it’s being serious but is actually just a schlocky deep dive into a can of worms. It’s tonally uneven, bulked up with Jungian filler, still ultimately all about the man, not as sexy as the original, and, on its own terms, just as sexist. There are two timelines: the present, in which Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson) has done 15 years for the murder of Alex Forrest (Lizzy Caplan) and is determined to prove his innocence (yes, one of the 2023 twists is that he may not even be guilty!), and the past, in which he is a hotshot LA prosecutor who says foreshadowy things such as “bad decisions lead to bad outcomes” when summing up.
He’s about to celebrate his 40th birthday, a judgeship and a move to the big house in the suburbs with his perfect wife, Beth (Amanda Peet), daughter and life. But then he is overlooked for the big job. Emasculated, you might say. And who should come winking along the corridor but beautiful, intense, understanding Alex, a victim support worker at the LA district attorney’s office? The toggle between times is designed to put Dan and Fatal Attraction in the dock but it’s confusing and often seems to have been edited with a sledgehammer. Mostly the time shifts are conveyed via Dan’s dishevel levels. Jackson’s hair does a lot of the heavy lifting.
He and Caplan – most recently seen stealing the show in Fleishman Is in Trouble – are compelling individually but lack chemistry together. It might be the script: their flirting amounts to some repartee about meatballs and daddy issues. Also, the beatsy soundtrack that kicks in whenever they look at each other does the exact opposite of increasing the tension. The sexiest part of their sex is Alex’s apartment.
It takes longer still to get anywhere near her viewpoint. Even then, what we see are the conniving ways she ensnares her victim. In the penultimate episode, there’s a dip into her unhappy childhood – the mother who abandoned her, a cruel, controlling father – but it feels like the bit that must be quickly undergone before returning to her monstrous deeds. What is lost along the way is the essential component that, despite their toxicity, you have to admit the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s possessed in spades: suspense.
Meanwhile, motifs from the original run through the series like a suited and stressed Michael Douglas rutting his way through the end of the last century. The bunny doesn’t get boiled but is still kicked by Alex and called the C-word. There’s an in-joke about Dan not minding there being no bathtub in his new place because bathtubs can be a bit creepy, which is as tasteless as it sounds. Other references work, such as the dropping of Alex’s famous line, “I am not going to be ignored, Dan,” into a voicemail like a bomb. But mostly they feel like distractions from the truth that Fatal Attraction remains as it ever was: a story about a man undone by a supposedly “mad” woman.
The series is directed and partly written by women who said they wanted to give the story back to Alex. But Caplan isn’t on-screen nearly enough, and her malign influence is even posited as the trigger for another young woman, the Gallaghers’ daughter Ellen, going bananas in the bizarre climax. The transplanting of genres, from erotic thriller to detective-mystery-meets-legal-procedural, traduces Alex further. She becomes a mystery to be solved; a body, rather than a severely mentally ill, isolated and dangerous woman. I don’t know if it’s possible, or even worthwhile, to remake Fatal Attraction from Alex’s point of view. But I do know that it hasn’t happened here.
• Fatal Attraction is on Paramount+.
