Netflix's 'Obsession' Is the Worst Erotic Thriller You'll Ever Watch

Netflix's four-part miniseries Obsession is adapted from Josephine Hart's 1991 novel Damage, which was previously filmed by Louis Malle under the same title. The source material tells the story of a surgeon's uncontrollable passion for his son's fiancée, culminating in death and disintegration. The premise contains everything a psychological thriller should offer: the undercurrents beneath bourgeois respectability, the variegated shapes of midlife crisis, and the self-destruction of the traumatised. Yet Netflix's adaptation floats upward at every point where it should have sunk deeper. What puzzles most is not the darkness of the story itself, but the fact that it never clarifies the one question at its core: why these two people, and why with such totality.

The series' first signature scene occurs at a family gathering, when Anna places an olive into William's mouth. The camera slows, the music tightens, and their gazes lock as if welded in place. The director clearly intends to establish a kind of fated gravitational pull. But afterwards, the series never returns to this moment, never reveals any backstory behind it, never explains why Anna singles out William, nor why William surrenders his defences to a near-stranger. The scene thus degenerates into a hollow ritual, inserted solely to propel the plot, empty from the start. Viewers spend the remaining three episodes waiting for the twist that would reveal a prior connection, but the twist never comes. The characters simply fall in love out of thin air, and with equal emptiness destroy their own lives.

This void triggers a chain reaction at the emotional level. William is a successful surgeon with an elegant and loving wife, Ingrid, and a steady, gentle son, Jay. The series lays out no visible psychological fissure, no midlife ennui, no professional frustration, no marital coldness as groundwork. His first infidelity occurs within twenty-four hours of his initial eye contact with Anna. This is not the accumulation of desire, not a tug-of-war between reason and impulse, but something that looks as if it has been fast-forwarded by a remote control. The audience is forced to accept that William's obsession needs no explanation. But "needs no explanation" in narrative is not mystery; it is laziness. Once the characters' choices lack psychological foundations, all subsequent consequences include betrayal, lies, and Jay's accidental death, which fall like dominoes pushed by an invisible hand, and we never glimpse what that hand looks like.

More troubling is the series' attempt to use Anna's childhood trauma as the key to her dangerous inclinations. Her brother had sexually abused her; her mother looked away. This backstory is dropped in late, as though it were a master key that opens every locked door. But the writing is mechanical: trauma is treated as a static label which, once affixed, automatically legitimises Anna's self-destructive behaviour, without ever being dramatised. Her sexual relationship with William is marked by power asymmetry and passivity, and the series appears to imply that this stems directly from her abuse. Such linear attribution is not only psychologically shallow but ethically uncomfortable: it reinforces the notion that unconventional desire must necessarily be pathological. Anna never exhibits a clear-eyed examination of her own actions; her remorse surfaces only after Jay's death, and is soon diluted by a vague gesture of "moving forward." Trauma here is not genuine psychological depth but a cheap explanatory device.

The concentration of these structural flaws is found in the series' intimate scenes. A work labelled "erotic thriller" should treat sex as the core vehicle for emotional and power dynamics. But in Obsession, each sexual encounter displays a striking mechanical quality. The locations (beside a cabinet, on the grass, against a corridor wall) presumably aim to suggest a wildness that cannot be contained by time or place, but the actual effect is that of a random checklist. Each encounter lasts so briefly that one suspects editorial cuts, roughly the duration of three deep breaths before the camera cuts away. And after each, Anna emits a sigh of satisfaction so disproportionate to the preceding action that an unbridgeable chasm opens between her response and what the viewer perceives. The most unwatchable moment occurs when William, alone at home, sniffs the pillow Anna has slept on and proceeds to perform a solitary act of self-gratification. The scene intends to portray the obsessive's lonely torment, but Armitage's physical performance is so overwrought and repetitious that the intended gravity slides into comedy. When the core visual material of an erotic work prompts the viewer to look away rather than hold their breath, the problem is no longer one of tonal miscalculation; it signals a fundamental misapprehension of desire itself.

Yet the single most indigestible moment arrives at the finale. Jay, having walked in on his father and fiancée, loses his footing and falls to his death. William's indulgence has directly killed his own son. By any reasonable tragic logic, this event should constitute a turning point, either plunging him into utter collapse and self-judgement, or nailing him to eternal regret. But Obsession takes a third route: William weeps at the funeral and falls silent in solitude, but soon seeks out Anna again, and in the final scene delivers the suffocating line: "I would do it all over again." He says he would walk the same path even knowing his son would die. If this line were presented as a clinical specimen of psychopathy, it might stand. But the series' visual language (the slow push-in, the mournful strings, Anna's expression of stunned revulsion) attempts to package it as a kind of "love at any cost." This is moral vacancy, not romance. And the series allows no space for reflection, no character to push back against that statement. Even Ingrid, upon learning the truth, responds only with a restrained cry, followed by silence. This is not withholding; it is abdication.

Set this version beside Louis Malle's 1992 Damage, and the disparity sharpens. In Malle's film, Jeremy Irons' surgeon likewise heads toward ruin, but he remains throughout in a state of slow, internal erosion, consumed by his own desire. Each exchange of glances with Anna's counterpart (Juliette Binoche) carries the fear of transgression; every touch is followed by a longer silence of digestion. After the son's death, Irons sits alone in the empty flat for an entire day without movement; the camera simply holds on his profile, not a performance of "sadness," but a state in which even the grief energy has been exhausted. In the Netflix version, Armitage maintains the same pitch of tension from his first stare to his final chase, with scarcely a variation in emotional wavelength. He resembles a sprinter perpetually at the starting block, never betraying fatigue or faltering. Ingrid, played by Indira Varma, becomes the only character with an actual emotional arc: her shock, humiliation, and maternal grief unfold with layered clarity in very limited screen time, which only highlights how flat the two leads' inner worlds remain.

By the end of four episodes, what the viewer may retain are fragments: Armitage's naked back on the endless staircase, the olive that recurs yet never serves its narrative function, the look on Anna's face when William says he would do it again, a look caught between shock and disgust. These shards do not assemble into a coherent psychological portrait; they assemble into a work that lacks integrity toward its own subject. It uses the word "obsession" but dares not ask what obsession actually costs; it displays forbidden bodies but evades the self-scrutiny that every forbidden act demands. In the end, Obsession leaves behind not the echo of desire, but the lingering question after the screen goes dark: why these two? The series never answers it, and probably never intended to.