Obsession (1976)

Obsession is Brian De Palma at his most operatic: a glossy, feverish romance-thriller that turns grief into a kind of beautiful delirium, all drifting through New Orleans shadow and Florentine light. It’s the sort of movie that seduces you with movement—restless camerawork, elegant compositions, and a soaring Bernard Herrmann score that makes every glance feel fated—while Cliff Robertson and Geneviève Bujold play the emotional stakes with just enough sincerity to keep the melodrama from floating away. The vibe is dreamlike, haunted, and unapologetically “too much” in the best way, as if the film itself can’t stop circling the same wound. If you want grounded realism, this may feel overheated, but if you’re in the mood for a classy, compulsive psychological swoon, it’s a vintage De Palma spell worth falling under.

Obsession is Brian De Palma trying to craft a swooning, operatic Hitchcock-style mystery about grief curdling into fixation, and on a purely atmospheric level it often delivers: lush visuals, a haunted mood, and a dreamlike sense of romantic doom. The problem is that it leans so hard on Vertigo’s blueprint that it can feel less like homage and more like an echo, and the story’s big turns ask for a lot of goodwill when it comes to plausibility and emotional logic. If you need your thrillers to be grounded, subtle, or remotely realistic, this one may test your patience—especially as it ramps into soap-opera extremes. But if you’re in the mood for glossy 70s melodrama, De Palma flourishes, and a mystery that plays like a fever dream rather than a puzzle you can believe in, it’s an intriguing, if uneven, watch.