I Can Make You Love Me (1993)

What makes I Can Make You Love Me linger is how it turns a seemingly ordinary workplace crush into a steadily tightening vise, capturing the particular dread of being watched, doubted, and left unprotected by the very systems meant to help. Brooke Shields gives Laura a grounded intelligence and vulnerability that keeps the film from feeling exploitative, while Richard Thomas is chilling precisely because he plays obsession with an unnervingly plausible calm rather than moustache-twirling villainy. The late-’80s Silicon Valley setting adds a crisp, corporate sheen that contrasts with the creeping menace, and the TV-movie pacing makes the escalation hit with blunt, nerve-rattling efficiency. It’s not a fun Friday-night horror ride—this is a grim, anxiety-inducing thriller based on real events—but if you want something tense, timely, and disturbingly believable, it’s hard to shake.

I Can Make You Love Me is clearly aiming to be a cautionary, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about workplace stalking and how institutions fail women until it’s too late, and that intention comes through. The problem is it’s staged in a very made-for-TV, paint-by-numbers way, so the escalation feels more like a checklist of incidents than a story with insight, and the later violence can come off as lurid rather than illuminating. Brooke Shields gives the material some grounded vulnerability and Richard Thomas is unsettling in a believable, everyday way, but the film still leans hard on “woman in peril” mechanics. If you’re looking for a thoughtful psychological thriller or a nuanced true-crime dramatization, this may feel exploitative and predictable; if you can tolerate grim subject matter and want a straightforward warning tale, it does deliver tension.