'Fatal Affair' Review: A psychological thriller so riddled with clichés you can actually pretend it's ironic
Spoilers for 'Fatal Affair'
Psychological thrillers seem to have lost their charm in the last few years. And that makes sense. For one, we have become better at recognizing mental health problems and that has led to lesser stigmatization of people who suffer from them — invariably, people who would always feature as the antagonist of films and shows like these. For another, the overwhelming amount of real-life problems seem to render make-believe thrills kind of unless.
However, one sure does miss a good rush. One misses the spine-chilling and gooseflesh-inducing moments in thrillers. One misses the heady feeling of foreboding. And more than anything, one misses the escape thrillers offer. After all, who wouldn’t like to check out of their lives for 90 minutes or so and invest in the meaningless lives and misadventures of people on screen, as they slowly get eliminated one at a time?
If the last one is what you are looking for and what you crave, then Peter Sullivan’s directorial debut of a script he co-wrote with Rasheeda Garner, 'Fatal Affair', is absolutely what you need. Make no mistake, the film starring Nia Long, Stephen Bishop and Omar Epps is delectably terrible. It follows an unhappy couple — Ellie (Long) and Marcus (Bishop). After Marcus suffers an accident, the two no longer have the happy marriage they had for two decades.
In her own words, Ellie feels she is "sleeping next to a stranger". Despite the fact that their daughter has moved to college and they have moved to a beach-front property away from the city, things are barely mending. And while this is in play, it's obvious that the story now introduces the agent of chaos. Ellie runs into David (Epps) at work and the two, who haven’t met since college, catch up. Over drinks, under the sultry aura of neon lights and the tune of Patrice Rushen’s iconic 'Forget Me Nots', the two find themselves steadily more attracted to each other. But as things begin to get hot and heavy, Ellie realizes her error in judgment and backs away.
To any consumer of the "woman scorned" subgenre of psychological thrillers, you know what comes next. David, obviously, does not want to give up on Ellie. He keeps texting and calling. He keeps showing up. And once thoroughly made clear that she doesn’t want anything to do with him, David takes a different approach. He begins dating Ellie’s friend in order to get into her life. Like I said before, delectably terrible. And an absolute cliché. But, it is fun.
Every scene — every next step — is unbelievably predictable. Yet, that is somehow what makes it fun. One can see from a mile away that David has personality and anger issues. One can see from even further away, that he will turn violent. And perhaps someone who is altogether new to the concept of psychological thrillers too would be able to successfully predict that David would stalk, follow and ultimately try to kill Ellie and her family. All because he is delusional.
Yet it is this predictability of the plot that makes it fun. It’s like watching a bad horror movie and knowing that the guy who has walked out of his room in the creepy manor to get a late-night smoke is going to probably die a gruesome death at the hands of a deranged serial killer. It makes you laugh. This is not to imply in any way that the film is self-aware and uses these tropes to make some kind of post-postmodern remark on the culture of fatal-attraction thrillers. Nope. But just to make the film more enjoyable for yourself, you can easily pretend it is.
That would make the psychiatrist telling cops on TV about David (her patient’s) narcissistic personality disorder okay. It would make Ellie’s extremely short-sighted friend’s unfaltering faith in the antagonist — someone she met a few weeks ago at best — more hilarious. And it would make the weirdly happy and calm ending spectacular. Almost a commentary on the transience of human experiences. 'Fatal Affair' is none of these things. But if you have 90 minutes to kill and you’re sick of watching well-crafted seemingly-intelligent dramas, you might as well watch this! 'Fatal Affair' is available for viewing on Netflix.