Obsession (Brian De Palma, 1976, USA)

Underseen relative to many of De Palma’s other works, Obsession marks the last film before the director’s true breakthrough with 1976’s Carrie. A collaboration with fellow New Hollywood director and screenwriter Paul Schrader, the film is De Palma’s imagining of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Instead of Jimmy Stewart, we get aging Hollywood star Cliff Robertson as our protagonist Michael Courtland, a New Orleans real estate developer who loses his wife and daughter in a botched kidnapping attempt in 1959. Fast forward to 16 years later, and Michael encounters a woman working at a church in Florence where he first met his wife who looks identical to her (Sandra, played by Genevieve Bujold).

If this all seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Behind the scenes, Michael’s business partner Robert LaSalle (Jon Lithgow, in his first appearance in a De Palma film), is orchestrating these schemes. And there is an even bigger twists that savvy viewers will see coming, and one that rankled studio executives in the mid-1970s and had to be toned down.

Perhaps due to its striking Hitchcock resemblances (De Palma even enlisted noted composer and Hitchcock partner Bernard Herrmann to write the film’s music, in one of his last scores), Obsession did not fare well with critics. Audiences were kinder, and the film turned a profit at the box office. That said, today Obsession appears to be a deeply idiosyncratic, odd, and surreal film - one that can be easily scrutinized to reveal its director’s unique obsessions (no pun intended). Yes, the film is pure absurd melodrama, but on that level, it is quite effective. Special points go to Jon Lithgow as the baddie (he would go on to play another baddie in De Palma’s 1981 film Blow Out). The Italian and New Orleans settings are nice touch as well.

7/10