Secret Obsession (2019)

Secret Obsession arrives as a 2019 Netflix thriller about a newlywed, Jennifer, who is attacked at a rest stop, wakes with amnesia, and is collected by a man claiming to be her husband. He is not her husband. The film knows this, we know this, and the ninety minutes that follow are devoted to the slow confirmation of a fact nobody bothered to hide. Peter Sullivan directs with the workmanlike efficiency of a man who has made many such films and intends to make many more. The mountain estate is handsome. The rain is relentless. The script, co-written with Kraig Wenman, regards suspense as a rumor it has heard about.

The picture does cast Brenda Song as its imperiled lead and Dennis Haysbert as the dogged detective, a pair of choices that give the proceedings a modest representational sheen. Neither performer is asked to comment on the significance of their presence, and neither does. This is casting as casting, not as statement. The film's interests lie elsewhere, which is to say in the mechanics of a woman chained to a bed while a stranger explains that he has loved her for years. That is the whole of its ambition.

There is no argument here about gender, race, class, or the climate. There is a freezer, a truck, a manipulated photograph, and a gun that changes hands at the correct moment. The critical consensus was unkind and not wrong. And yet the thing found forty million viewers, which tells us something about appetite and very little about art. A serviceable diversion, culturally silent, and content to remain so.