By all rights DARK OBSESSION, released in Great Britain as DIAMOND SKULLS, should be an interesting film. The cast is strong and the subject--erotic obsession, guilt and betrayal--fairly compelling. But instead it's terribly dull, almost amazingly so.
Sir Hugo Buckton (Gabriel Byrne), whose aristocratic but financially strapped family must allow public tours of its ancestral home to afford its upkeep, is married to the sensual, bewitching and successful Virginia (Amanda Donohoe). Convinced that she's unfaithful, he retreats into obsessive and
self-destructive behavior, drinking too much and picking fights with Virginia. His family, who never really approved of her because she's not from a titled background, encourage Hugo's increasingly irrational treatment of his wife.
Out carousing one night with his friends, Hugo runs down and kills a young woman who looks rather like Virginia, near the home of the man with whom Hugo believes Virginia is having an affair. They all agree to hush up the accident, though young Jamie (Douglas Hodge)--who's dating Hugo's sexpot
sister Rebecca (Sadie Frost)--feels they should call the police. The accident unnerves Hugo. He drinks excessively and his relationship with Virginia grows icier still.
A fundamentally decent young man, Jamie keeps making noises about wanting to go to the police. Hugo receives a vague blackmail note and is further agitated, though it proves to have been sent by Rebecca, who protests she just wanted to shake up her brother. Amid plans for Rebecca's lavish
birthday party, Hugo and his friends decide they must kill Jamie to guarantee his silence. They do, insuring that they can continue their degenerate, amoral lives undisturbed.
If DARK OBSESSION is meant to be a thriller, it fails miserably, since it isn't at all thrilling. Gabriel Byrne (GOTHIC, MILLER'S CROSSING) glowers and broods, his friends plot and scheme and his parents (Judy Parfitt and Michael Hordern) fuss about like the anachronisms they are--she malicious,
he rather charming. Nothing much happens after the hit and run accident, though many meaningful glances are exchanged. Director Nick Broomfield may mean this to be the point, that the English aristocracy is paralyzed by its own hypocrisy and corruption. If that's the case, it's a point that's been
made before and to better effect, in such films as Joseph Losey's riveting THE SERVANT.
The film's several sex scenes, one of which displays the long and lovely Amanda Donohoe (the controversial C.J. Lamb on TV's "L.A. Law") to attractive advantage, are explicit indeed, but on the whole rather clinical, verging on distastefulness. They fulfill a rhetorical function, suggesting that
among the debased aristocracy, sex is just one more medium of devious exchange. But they aren't at all erotic, and since the story hinges on sexual jealousy in the form of Sir Hugo's patently unreasonable conviction that his wife is sleeping with another man, this lack of eroticism undermines what
little narrative there is.
DARK OBSESSION attempts to make a serious social statement within the context of a mainstream entertainment. But the mix never gels, and it succeeds as neither. (Violence, substance abuse, profanity, sexual situations, nudity.) leave a comment
