Obsession Reviews

In 1959, wealthy New Orleans businessman Michael Courtland (Robertson) receives word that his wife Elizabeth (Bujold) and daughter Amy (Wanda Blackman) have been kidnapped. Following police instructions, Courtland puts blank pieces of paper instead of money in the ransom package, along with a radio transmitter that will lead the cops to the kidnappers. Once they realize they've been, duped, the kidnappers lead they police on a car chase that ends with the criminal's car crashing into the Mississippi River, with Elizabeth and Amy trapped inside. The bodies are never recovered. Sixteen years later, Courtland and his business partner (Lithgow) travel to Florence, where Courtland meets a look-alike for his dead wife (Bujold). The plottings become more and more complicated as Courtland attempts to find out just who this woman is. For a De Palma film, OBSESSION has much more suspense than violence, even if much of the premise and motivations are shamelessly culled from Hitchcock's VERTIGO, as is composer Bernard Herrmann (who received a posthumous Oscar nomination for his work here) The lack of originality, however, doesn't make OBSESSION any less effective, and the film has been generally overlooked in the spotty De Palma canon. Robertson is thoroughly credible as the man who is so obsessed with thoughts of his missing wife that he falls for the pretty, young Bujold, trying to recreate in her his past love.