James Walton

Boring is as good as this erotic drama gets: Netflix’s Obsession reviewed

Plus: BBC Two's Colin from Accounts combines charm with plenty of irreverence and a fair degree of filth

William (Richard Armitage) and Anna (Charlie Murphy) have urgent and refreshingly guilt-free sex against a variety of walls in Obsession. Image: Ana Blumenkron / Netflix 
issue 22 April 2023

It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing itself as ‘erotic’ is in fact deeply boring. Unfortunately, faced with Netflix’s four-part Obsession, the b-word is hard to avoid – the twist in this case being that boring was as good as the series got. The rest of the time it alternated between the inept, the infuriating and the utterly mystifying – and not just because you could never fathom what on earth the characters thought they were up do.

How, for instance, did so much money and talent get wasted on a show that the people involved with must surely have realised was terrible? And did the makers really think that we’d put up with any amount of humourless tosh just for the sake of some sex and nudity? (Not, admittedly, that my 15-year-old self would have had a problem.)

The sex was largely wordless, which, given the dialogue when they did speak, was maybe just as well

For what it’s worth, here’s the basic plot – at which point I might have issued a spoiler alert if Obsession hadn’t come pre-spoiled.

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