Lisa, played by Larter with gleeful acceptance of the part’s incoherence, cries more than she threatens her most successful weapon is her trembling lower lip (well, that and roofies). It took me a second watch to see that Obsessed is about white-lady tears. In the final showdown, when the temp Lisa (Larter) reaches for that symbolic weapon to threaten Sharon with, she winds up brandishing a floor lamp so bland that the only words it calls to mind are floor lamp. Aside from one arty boxing photograph, Derek’s office looks like a Sharper Image catalog, and Sharon spends her time in their new home, drowning in beige and taupe, surrounded by wall art and generic objets that signify precisely nothing. The mise-en-scène around the black family is so muted it’s nearly invisible. Derek (Elba) is the only black vice president in his investment firm, while Sharon (Beyoncé) only gets help from white neighbors to look after their baby, Kyle. Moreover, it takes place in a white world. Featuring a super couple built from the most attractive crossover black star-power of the day-Elba still closely associated with The Wire, Beyoncé fresh off Dreamgirls-with Ali Larter as the unbalanced temp, the film has mainstream hopes written all over it. Obsessed was the first, and arguably the whitest, of this subgenre. Henson something to do that doesn’t involve being a cop, a maid, or someone’s black best friend. Critically reviled, these films nevertheless make healthy returns on their modest budgets while giving actors like Regina Hall, Morris Chestnut, Sanaa Lathan, and Taraji P. Meanwhile, Screen Gems, Sony’s small-budget genre subsidiary, has released a black-fronted thriller every September since 2014: No Good Deed, The Perfect Guy, and When the Bough Breaks. While Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, both glossy, self-conscious literary adaptations about downward white mobility, did well, they’ve barely nudged Hollywood’s focus away from teenage-boy-friendly, big-budget action franchises. This is an important question, because the future of the domestic thriller is black (or at least nonwhite).
What, if anything, is Obsessed obsessed with? Which is why, on watching Obsessed, the 2009 film starring Idris Elba, Beyoncé Knowles, and Ali Larter, I was at first nonplussed by the aggressive blankness of its sets. Consider the menacing household objects that come into play in the films I’ve covered in this series: the shovel in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (fertility!), the nail gun in Pacific Heights (home improvement!), those perfectly straightened cans and towels in Sleeping with the Enemy (housework!). Part of the joy of watching these films lies in decoding their object fetishes, which tend to come to a head in the final reel, as improvised weapons define each film’s understanding of the terms of domesticity at stake. Obsessed, as they are, with both the trappings and traps of the middle class, most domestic thrillers are invested in interior decoration to a degree that would make Nancy Meyers blush.