And the rage so palpable through the first half of that record, in tracks like Don’t Hurt Yourself and Sorry, certainly exists somewhere in Obsessed – albeit buried beneath camp histrionics and girl fights.īut that Obsessed has been framed in such a fashion, almost as a tongue-in-cheek prequel to more legitimate work, is indicative of its modern existence as a comic curio, and such a jarring anomaly in Beyoncé’s career that it can only be rationalised through celebrating its absurdity.īack in 2009, it was the film’s unexpectedness as a Beyoncé project that apparently appealed to her. Today the scene is often referenced in relation to Beyoncé’s 2016 opus Lemonade, in particular its allusions to an ambiguous mistress of husband Jay-Z’s she refers to as “Becky with the good hair”. In that ending, one so deliriously camp and fun that it’s by and large the only thing anyone remembers about Obsessed, Sharon is suddenly taken over by the spirit of Beyoncé Knowles, scratching and headbutting her love rival, winding her with a floor lamp and shrieking a number of lines outrageous in their naked eagerness for internet-meme immortality. It makes absolutely no sense, but the scenes also mark the movie’s sole reason to exist.
It’s only in the film’s final 15 minutes that Obsessed appears to recognise the goldmine they have in their cast, awkwardly morphing Sharon from a paragon of wooden timidity into a ruthless, quippy street-fighter with a killer right hook. Instead it cycles through the “Nineties domestic thriller” playbook with slavish devotion, Larter endlessly attempting to seduce Elba in hotels, bathrooms and parking garages, a scene in which she sneaks into the Beyoncé family home to abduct their young son, and lingering shots of a very unsteady attic floor that inevitably feeds into the film’s climax.Īnd all the while Beyoncé is on background duty, Obsessed largely wasting its sheer Beyoncé-ness by having her mope around her kitchen and read in bed.
It was also the last time her name was attached in a significant capacity to something so wildly beneath her, and is so head-scratchingly awful you can’t help but secretly adore it.Ī diluted, ludicrously sexless spin on Fatal Attraction, Obsessed cast Beyoncé in the Anne Archer role to Idris Elba’s Michael Douglas, playing a by-the-numbers stay-at-home mother named Sharon who is horrified by her husband’s apparent infidelity and subsequently stalked by his psychotic blonde mistress. The first time she didn’t play a singer in a movie, and to date the last time she would physically appear in a film at all, Obsessed marked the last stand of what could be considered Beyoncé 1.0, the beta version of the triumphant and consistently astounding Beyoncé of today.
Obsessed, the erotic thriller in question, remains an integral part of Beyoncé lore, but not particularly for the reasons you might imagine.
#BEYONCE OBSESSED MOVIE#
In response to a clip of a new and decidedly unsexy erotic thriller brought along by a pop icon turned would-be movie star, those watching the taping of David Letterman’s US talk show expressed something rarely heard since: they laughed at Beyoncé. Ten years ago this week on the set of a famed New York talk show, hundreds of audience members did something that today would be considered unthinkable.