Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you may have heard of the newest Netflix craze – Peter Sullivan’s Secret Obsession. Netflix have been heavily promoting the stalker thriller up to and previous to its release date and it’s even gone viral for leaving viewers ‘too terrified to sleep’. My name’s Jazz and I’m one of the writers here at SSZeeMedia and I have so many things to say about this film.
But I can promise you that not one of them is that I will be too scared to sleep – in fact, I’m pretty sure I’m going to sleep like a baby.
For those of you who haven’t seen the film, it centers around Jennifer (portrayed by Suite Life’s Tipton, Brenda Song) who is hit by a car in the first few moments of the movie. She’s left with some pretty serious injuries such as a broken leg, a punctured lung and amnesia following her accident. Her husband Russell (Mike Vogel) turns up to watch over her while she recovers and soon realises that he has no idea who she is. How convenient seeing as he isn’t really her husband at all and is in fact, a stalker that used to work with her. The story unfolds that other people start to realise that not everything is as it appears with the doting husband and the Detective (Dennis Haysbert) assigned to her case starts to do some digging. It is soon uncovered that he isn’t who he appears to be and the ‘epic’ final battle ensues.
Sounds like a decent plot, right? You are right. But the problem is that Netflix showed all of this in their trailer promoting the film. The two minute long trailer showed the plot twist and exactly how he carried out all of his tricks to try and hide who he was which meant that all of the suspense was taken out immediately as soon as the film began for those who had seen the trailer. This is a known problem across the film industry that when showcasing the best parts of the film, the trailer can get carried away and reveal too much.
What would have been an intriguing marketing tool for Netflix would have been to change the name of the film so that it’s not so blatantly obvious what is going to happen and keep the trailer carefully edited to only show Jennifer’s recovery from her accident. This would make it seem that it was some sort of sad romantic drama and then when the plot twist is revealed, it would throw all of the viewers off of their feet and increase the thrills and spills tenfold.
For me, these sort of stalker thrillers are one of my favourite types of film genre so I was incredibly disappointed with this film but I feel like Netflix shot itself in the foot with their marketing. I’m by no means a hardened horror fan – I’ll be as scared as the rest of them when the film is actually scary but the scariest thing I found was how badly Photoshopped those photos were! Jennifer realises that the mirror doesn’t show the right hairstyle but completely misses that Ryan’s head is a completely different shade to Russell’s body. Perhaps she just thought he had a bad tan.
All in all, I would rate it a ★½. What did you guys think? Let us know in the comments.
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I actually decided not to watch this, exactly because it seemed like everything had already been revealed in the trailer.
For the first half of the trailer, I was really intrigued, thinking “Something’s wrong here”, but then they revealed both that something was indeed wrong and exactly *what* was wrong. Didn’t see how there was all that much they could add to that.