Obsession review: in Netflix's new psychosexual thriller, BDSM stands for bland, dull, slow, and monotonous

Obsession is, at best, a sketch. Netflix’s psychosexual thriller – “thriller” here used very loosely – charts an illicit affair between celebrated surgeon William Farrow (Richard Armitage) and his son’s fiancé Anna Barton (Charlie Murphy). It’s an adaptation of Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel Damage, which has already inspired a film version with Jeremy Irons and a subsequent opera; watching Obsession, which visibly strains to fill its four episodes with anything of much substance, you’d be forgiven for assuming it was based on a short pamphlet, or maybe just an unfinished paragraph. The result is something at once completely hollow and desperately dull - the first episode, which runs to just 30 minutes, is perhaps literally the longest any half hour has ever been in the history of time.

That sense of Obsession as being just the vaguest sketch extends to every level of the production. On a design level, it’s oddly and often distractingly cheap- seeming, with ostensibly moody lighting presumably intended mainly to disguise half-furnished sets. Most of William and Anna’s affair is conducted in her flat, which was constructed specially on a sound stage for the series (the idea being that filming there rather than in a real building would better protect the actors’ privacy). It gives the series this visibly-not-lived-in feel, and in turn a strangely sterile aesthetic throughout. Scenes set in public always seem to have just a couple too few extras, as if the budget couldn’t quite stretch to include any more actors, and in an early scene where William leaves work it looks like the hospital has been greenscreened in behind him.

It's worse, though, when it comes to the chemistry between the two leads – or indeed the lack thereof. Armitage and Murphy have both, at least, done considerably better work elsewhere (even as Murphy was underserved by the final series of Happy Valley), and Obsession is unlikely to be remembered for long. If this is anyone’s introduction to either, though, they might find themselves impressed by what seems to be the first screen credit for two actors without any prior professional experience. Both of them, somehow, deliver lines about things as mundane as lunch and holidays with the sort of unfamiliarity normally reserved for bad sci-fi technobabble, in each instance managing to sound like they’re interacting with another human being for the first time in their life.

That’s not entirely their fault, though, as Obsession asks them to struggle through what is surely one of the most leaden and clunky scripts ever commissioned by Netflix. It’s pared back but no nimbler as a result, frequently blunt and inelegant; the dialogue is lacking any sort of wit or flair, and the obsessive relationship at the heart of the show is rendered in the most basic and perfunctory language imaginable. Compared to, for example, the Harlan Coben thrillers that Armitage has appeared in for Netflix – which are always pleasingly schlocky in what’s clearly a very deliberate way – Obsession is almost entirely devoid of recognisable personality.

How much that all matters is, maybe, another question. Obsession is a show that will, if nothing else, find an audience for an obvious reason. But it’s also clear that writer Morgan Lloyd Malcolm has loftier aims, describing in interviews efforts to make her lead characters deeper and more well rounded than their prose inspiration; judged by those intentions, Obsession is even more obviously a failure, and even in fact a little wrongheaded for how cavalier and insensitive it is in invoking a backstory of abuse to explain Anna. Little about Obsession works, either way. To borrow an acronym, it’s bland, dull, slow, and monotonous. 

Obsession is streaming on Netflix now. You can listen to us discuss Obsession on Screen Babble, and sign up for Netflix here.

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