In Obsession, Netflix’s new BDSM thriller, the chaos begins when femme fatale Anna Barton starts giving sex eyes to her future father-in-law. “Is that for me?” she breathes, before he erotically pops an olive into her mouth. This, by the way, is the first time they’ve spoken. I was nervous when I met my boyfriend’s dad for the first time, but at least I didn’t do anything that weird.
This is the problem with this adaptation of Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel, later made into a film in 1992 starring Jeremy Irons: it wants to gird our loins, but often it just makes us giggle. Obsession has been hailed as the successor to Fifty Shades of Grey, but instead it gives us an overload of shlock, foreboding string music and some depressing, grunty shagging.
