Brian De Palma’s Obsession is what happens when you take Vertigo, run it through a fever dream, lace it with high melodrama, and let Bernard Herrmann sob his heart out onto the score. It’s overwrought. It’s excessive. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And it’s kind of great. Sure, Alfred Hitchcock probably hurled his brandy snifter at the wall when he saw what De Palma had cooked up here, but originality is overrated when you can just take Vertigo, crank the volume to eleven, and marinate it in enough Catholic guilt and Freudian chaos to make even a soap opera writer blush.
A History as Twisted as Its Protagonist’s Psyche
The origins of Obsession lie in a simple premise: “What if we remade Vertigo but somehow made it weirder?” De Palma, along with screenwriter Paul Schrader (who was still running high on his Taxi Driver cynicism), crafted a script called Déjà Vu—a title that screamed, “Yes, we know we’re ripping off Hitchcock, and we’re fine with it.” Schrader’s original script was an epic, a sprawling three-act opera of trauma and manipulation, culminating in a 1985-set coda that explored an even deeper level of disturbing love and fixation.
But De Palma, always the pragmatist (and by “pragmatist,” I mean someone with a healthy disdain for things that cost too much), hacked off the final act like a butcher prepping a slab of prime obsession-meat. Bernard Herrmann, the legendary composer behind Psycho, took one look at Schrader’s original ending and reportedly told De Palma to “get rid of it.” This, coming from a man who thought stabbing strings were a reasonable way to depict showering. Schrader was, understandably, livid and disavowed the movie faster than a film school student denying their love of Fight Club.
Cliff Robertson, Tantrums, and Tanning Lotion
If Obsession has a weak link, it’s Cliff Robertson, who reportedly made life on set a waking nightmare. Not only did he insist on a deep bronze tan that left cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond shrieking in frustration—at one point, he allegedly shoved Robertson into a wooden wall and screamed, “You are the same color as this wall!”—but he also gave deliberately bad performances during Geneviève Bujold’s reverse shots. It’s one thing to chew the scenery; it’s another to sabotage your co-star because you don’t want her stealing focus.
Bujold, on the other hand, is the heart and soul of this twisted tale, delivering a performance so tragically romantic that Bernard Herrmann straight-up fell in love with her. She visited the London recording sessions, complimented him on how his music “made love to her” since Robertson wouldn’t, and Herrmann reportedly burst into tears. His widow later found a picture of Bujold in his wallet after his death. The man wasn’t composing a film score—he was composing a love letter.
Then there’s John Lithgow, playing Robertson’s oily business partner with the kind of Southern accent that suggests he was raised on mint juleps and villainy. De Palma has said that he regretted casting Robertson, but Lithgow? Lithgow is right at home, gleefully twisting the knife at every turn like a man who already knows he’s going to be playing evil psychiatrists and deranged killers for the next forty years.
A Film That Critics Couldn’t Quite Quit
Upon release, Obsession was met with a combination of intrigue, praise, and the occasional dramatic eye-roll. Roger Ebert was all in, celebrating it as an “overwrought melodrama” and arguing that its excess was precisely what made it work. Pauline Kael, normally De Palma’s loudest cheerleader, dismissed it as “whirling around nothingness,” which is a polite way of saying, “Brian, please get some therapy.” Vincent Canby was unimpressed, pointing out that it was essentially Vertigo with an extra layer of Freudian nightmare fuel, but let’s be honest—that’s a selling point.
Columbia Pictures, clearly unsure of what they had, dumped the film into theaters in late August, a graveyard slot where movies go to die. Instead, it thrived. Herrmann’s swelling, tragic score practically yanked audiences into their seats, and Obsession became De Palma’s first substantial box-office hit. Sure, the incestuous undertones were a bit much, and the wedding sequence had to be visually softened to avoid some very uncomfortable questions, but the movie found its fans. Over the decades, it’s gained cult appreciation, with modern critics recognizing it as a stylistic powerhouse. If Vertigo is a carefully constructed psychological study, Obsession is that study after it’s been drinking heavily and making regrettable life choices.
The Verdict: Four Stars of Hypnotic Madness
Obsession is the cinematic equivalent of staring into a funhouse mirror and realizing that, yes, the distortion is deeply unsettling—but you can’t look away. It’s a fever dream of loss, manipulation, and Geneviève Bujold existing so luminously that even Bernard Herrmann was ready to ditch reality for her. Cliff Robertson is miscast, but Bujold and Lithgow carry the film, and De Palma, for all his Hitchcockian lifting, delivers a hallucinatory nightmare that lingers long after the credits roll.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)
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Is it absurd? Yes. Is it unsubtle? Absolutely. Would Hitchcock have stormed onto set in a rage? Probably. But Obsessionisn’t Vertigo—it’s Vertigo after taking a long, hard look in the mirror and deciding, “Let’s go weirder.”
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