Secret Obsession (2019) - Movie Review

Time for a little trip in the WABAC Machine to one of my earliest reviews: Before I Go To Sleep. If any of my long-time readers have forgotten about this movie, don’t be alarmed because I had pretty much forgotten about it myself. A psycho-thriller that is essentially 50 First Dates on Ambien, it served mainly as a reason to waste the talents of the actors involved (my opinion on Nicole Kidman as an actress has improved dramatically since writing that initial review) and an example of how to do psycho-thrills poorly. I bring all this up because the film we’re looking at right now is basically that film minus anything interesting.

For a film meant to keep audiences on the edge of their seats, the tension is so freaking loose that you can play jump-rope with it. It starts on a similar note to BIGTS in how the main character is amnesiac after a mysterious accident and the proceeding plot is her trying to recollect not just what happened, but what her life even was prior to it. However, for as desperately as Jim Dooley’s soundtrack tries to convince us that this is serious stuff, the film plays its cards far too openly and with dialogue that barely masks what’s actually going on that, because it’s too easy to figure things out right from the start, there’s no investment.

Part of that is down to Kraig Wenman and director Peter Sullivan’s scripting, but largely, it’s because of the acting. Last time we caught up with Mike Vogel, he was adding another iteration of 'we hate atheists' to PureFlix’s already-extensive repertoire, and Brenda Song’s presence here in the lead seems to be the latest instance of a former Disney star branching out into more ‘adult’ material. Any semblance of chemistry between them is paper-thin, so it can’t even start the subterfuge on solid footing, and their attempts to hide secrets from each other are so bloody conspicuous, it turns into a type of layered bad acting where both the actor and the character is unconvincing and neither result is intentional.

There’s also the main nail in this film’s coffin, and what ends up souring a lot of more recent films for me: Being so lame that it makes me look back at films I wrote off years ago and re-assess what they did right by comparison. BIGTS has a lot of issues to it as well, but at least its main premise allowed for actual tension, making the audience figure out who is genuinely trustworthy, and the bigger implications of the lead being lied to for a decade after her attack gave it a proper, if underutilised, psychological edge. Seriously, referring to the utter drywall slab that is BIGTS as having "edge" is only making me angrier at this film.

It’s not just that this film is boring, and it certainly is from what I saw. It’s the kind of boring where, because there is so much apathy flowing through every aspect of the production, the only rational reason for the result I can fathom is that they intended to make a boring movie. Because the notion that this is actually meant to be gripping is so ludicrous, it almost turns this into an unintentional comedy through sheer bewilderment. But no, that would imply there was even an ironic reason to watch this thing, and since BIGTS is also on Netflix… yeah, watch that instead. It’s not a great film, or even all that good, but I can guarantee that you’ll at least remember it seconds after watching it. This film? Not so much.