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Obsessed

1989, Movie, PG-13, 103 mins

Obsessed: Review

Dinah Middleton (Kerrie Keane) is a Montreal woman whose young son is fatally injured in a bloody hit-and-run accident. Furious that the culprit is still at large, Dinah steals a list of possibly implicated cars from the detective in charge of the case and finds the rental car that ran over her child. She tracks down the driver, Owen Hughes (Saul Rubinek), in New York, but her ex-husband, a lawyer (played by Daniel Pilon), informs her that, under the current US-Canada treaty, American hit-and-run drivers can't be extradited to face charges in Canada. Enraged at this injustice, Dinah returns to New York and begins an obsessive campaign to harass or trick Hughes into going back to Canada. OBSESSED is not dull, just thoroughly implausible. Relying on subgenre conventions, the screenplay barely establishes motivation. Spry uses the hit-and-run case as a paradigm of Canadian frustration with the US' tendency to regard its neighbor with imperial condescension, if at all. Unfortunately, the point is made largely by turning Rubinek's character into a sitting target, an obnoxious Yankee yuppie with some laughable lines of dialog. All the major players do serviceable work, though only Kerrie Keane as the distraught mother is memorable. leave a comment