You would think for a pop culture buff such as myself, being paid to watch and review a movie would be the dream. Boy was I wrong when it came to Peter Sullivan’s latest psychosexual thriller, Fatal Affair, which is now streaming on Netflix.
As someone who’s embraced her love for cheesy and terrible movies unabashedly (I did watch 365 DNI, Europe’s unironic answer to the 50 Shades trilogy ), I was excited to embark on this journey. But as I started doing research on it prior, that excitement slowly turned to dread.
The trailer was laughable, IMDB gave it a 4.4/10 star rating and Rotten Tomatoes gave it a mere 18%.
Looks like I was in for a treat. Scroll down to read the review, in full.
If you didn’t already realise from the title, Fatal Affair is about a illicit encounter between high-powered lawyer Ellie (played by Nia Long) and computer hacker David (played by Omar Epps) that turns, well, fatal.
Once former college classmates, the two reconnect over a work assignment and “sparks” fly. To make things more clichéd, Ellie and her husband Marcus (who is a total smokeshow, I want to see more of him!) have a supposedly stale marriage.
While Ellie and David have a steamy make out session, Ellie’s guilty conscious kicks in before anything else happens, leaving her to sever all ties with David. David, unbeknownst to her, has been obsessed with Ellie since college and makes it his life’s mission to make Ellie his. He starts to infiltrate her life by dating her best friend, befriending her husband, stealing her hair and underwear, turning her life into a living hell, you know, standard stalker stuff.
While the movie earns points for its diverse cast, the plot is shockingly simple and unoriginal. And while that can be forgiven if its main cast had sizzling chemistry, unfortunately there was zero sexual tension between Ellie and David. The movie also doesn’t make it a point to build up any tension between them, making me wonder just WHY was David so obsessed with Ellie.
And with all psychological thrillers, I was hoping that I was in for at least a couple of steamy sex scenes. I went into this hoping for something akin to Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct. Instead what I got was Fatal Attraction with a lot less sex.
David as a villain is also painfully obvious, with no nuance to his character at all. He’s clearly awful and creepy right from the start, skulking in the shadows as he watches his prey. The movie also makes sure to not give him any redeeming qualities at all, making me feel no sympathy whatsoever for his character. The music is also comically on the nose, with ominous tones whenever David appears. Thankfully, this turned out to be a godsend, because I found myself drifting away from time to time to scroll through Instagram, just to be jerked back whenever *sinister* music started playing.
Anyway — spoiler alert — anything exciting happens in the last 10 minutes, when David starts to become unhinged and decides to attack Ellie’s friends and family. So if you want to find out what happens just fast forward to the end.
I wish I could classify this movie as one of those “so bad it’s good” type of films, but unfortunately it was just unoriginal, unclimatic and a drag to watch. In fact, the next time Netflix puts this movie up on your recommends, do yourself a favor and put on The Umbrella Academy instead.
Movie Rating: 1/5
Text: Cheryl Chan