Fatal Attraction review: An ’80s erotic thriller is reimagined
The Paramount Plus series, an update of Adrian Lyne’s classic, stars Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson
TV Reviews Fatal attraction
How do you solve a problem like Alex Forrest? The character, made (in)famous by Glenn Close in Adrian Lyne’s classic 1987 film Fatal Attraction, is clearly a problem. For who and why is the central tension at the heart of the film, yes, but more so in this fleshed-out reimagined television series where Lizzy Caplan (Fleishman Is In Trouble, Masters Of Sex) takes on Close’s iconic role of a scorned mistress turned crazed and violent stalker. Adapting that lightning rod of an ’80s erotic thriller for a 2020s audience is no easy feat, especially once you decide to forgo the contracted suspense a brisk two-hour run time affords you and settle on a lengthy eight-episode run. And while there’s plenty to admire in how Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes have approached the material, this Fatal Attraction, which premieres April 30 on Paramount+, feels hampered by its own structural conceit, turning the film’s original bombshell ending into its own narrative engine. (Speaking of that conceit, be warned that spoilers follow.)
It’s 2023, and Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson), a famed-and-later-disgraced DA in the Los Angeles area is hoping to get paroled 15 years after he was found guilty of murdering Alex Forrest (Caplan). They’d had an affair, that much is clear—and he’s now, belatedly, it seems, taking responsibility for what he was found guilty of. (Not a day goes by without him thinking about her, he admits.) Yet, once he’s out and trying to piece his life back together—including by meeting the young daughter he left behind—it’s clear that Dan has only one goal: prove once and for all that he didn’t kill Alex.
The series, then, begins with a whodunnit structure that then allows us enough of a frame to flash back to when an affable and charming (if slightly privileged and cocky) Dan first met a young woman working at Victim Services after she caught his eye one morning. The first few episodes of Paramount+’s steamy drama all focus mostly on Dan—how his upcoming promotion may bring him the prestige and career advancement he’s long coveted, how his future move out of his current home is set to tee him up for a perhaps unwelcome change of pace, and how that dashing curly-haired young woman seems to stay on his mind even when he’s focused on trying to nail prosecutions for murders in which the body may not ever show up. His is a story of how influence and affluence have set him up to succeed and get everything he’s always wanted. That is, until he doesn’t.
His eventual affair with Alex, we’re led to believe, is partly prompted by a failed promotion and a feeling of what we would rightly call a midlife crisis. Yet Dan is, we’re told over and over again, a good man. A righteous man. This is why so many of his colleagues are mildly weary of him; he’s too much of a golden boy. Here’s where Jackson’s casting seems perfect. While Caplan is handed the more difficult role (Alex needs to be a graspable cipher, a knowing enigma that begs to be solved), Jackson plays to his boyish charm; his Dan is a likable cad whose charm is always at risk of irking you were he not so earnest and sincere. In the present, this is what makes any attempts at clearing his name all the trickier. So few people are willing to help him. Sure, his fixer (Toby Huss) is still up for it. But for others, his eventual conviction felt like vindication: finally, some accountability for the kind of seemingly nice straight white guys who feel they can get away with anything—including murder.
The twinned and intertwined storytelling, which shuttles between these two timelines and offers constant narrative rewinds of its key moments, means Fatal Attraction isn’t (solely) inching toward what we know will be a bloody climax but is intent, instead, on grappling with the many thorny ethical issues it invites. Mostly because, in addition to moving us back and forth in time, the show constantly shifts points of view: Not only do we follow Dan as he navigates his affair, for instance, but we then get to witness what it felt like from Alex’s perspective—and later still from that of Dan’s wife Beth (Amanda Peet) at the time and even his daughter Ellen (Alyssa Jirrels) in the present as she struggles with reuniting with a father she hasn’t seen for 15 years.
In fact, Ellen’s entire timeline, which includes her therapy sessions as well as her psychoanalytic studies, end up serving as the intellectual framework of the entire show: “What people think of other people is only a projection of themselves,” she says, earnestly at one point, distilling the kind of overly literate dialogue that litters the series. Ellen’s droll, intellectual, and pointedly self-aware perspective gives audiences a chance to think about Jungian and Freudian ideas about desire and identity, about shadow beings and unknowable female archetypes, that complement the conversations around compassion and cynicism within the justice system that Dan and Alex have in between their meet-cute escapades. Here’s Fatal Attraction (1987) filtered through an at times painfully (and almost paralyzingly) self-reflective lens—as if the series were aware that its central setup (a murdered mistress) couldn’t possibly be uncritically presented lest it be misread as the stuff of puerile thrillers.
There is an attempt, with every new episode, to complicate the audience’s expected understanding of what took place between Alex and Dan—and what may have contributed to her tragic death. It’s not just that the show fleshes out Alex’s mental-health issues or that it really wants to examine the question of how far anyone would go for a loved one, careful to neither pathologize nor excuse unprompted violence, not to mention emotionally manipulative behavior. It’s that it sets itself up as wanting to do all of the above in service of what’s nevertheless an erotic thriller.
The questions it poses over and over again (Was this ultimately an affair gone wrong or was this an orchestrated entrapment gone right? Was this merely a crime of passion or a premeditated act? Did she have it coming? Could he be anything but guilty?) are both central and immaterial, especially as the series trudges toward a final episode whose reveal feels like both an all-too-clever reinvention of Lyne’s original film and yet a mostly unsatisfying neutering of the movie’s jaw-dropping ending. In this Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest may not be (so) problematic, but that only makes her even more of a narrative and storytelling problem than the show and Caplan together can adeptly handle.
Fatal Attraction premieres April 30 on Paramount+.
38 Comments
Did someone say Toby Huss?!
Nobody beats him! NOBODY!
“You learn what we make in the factory when you work in the factory!”
My avatar!
This remake is not going to be ignored. Dan.
Narrator: It will be ignored.
They’re making a series out of this? What’s she gonna boil a different pet animal every week?
You’d thing eventually he’d catch on. Pre-Alex, all family pets healthy and accounted for. Post-Alex, escalating pet death. Hmm. Not much of a prosecutor, is he?
Maybe he really likes soup…
Just wait ‘til you see what happens to the lobster!
Not Fluffy!
I wish I had but more than one star to give for my country.
Naming a lobster “Fluffy” (or even having a “pet lobster”)?Take my star you sick fuck!
Nope. She’s going for humans in this one. (Episode 4)
I guess this sounds like what I’d expect from a 2020’s remake of an 80’s psychosexual thriller, but a whole lot of the fun of the film was Dan’s dawning realization that Alex was not right and he personally had fucked up badly bringing her into his (and eventually his family’s) life. It was definitely comeuppance for a guy who felt entitled to his little fun and then going home to the family.
They should’ve made Alex a guy this go-around. Would Beth know about him swinging both ways? I say write her as aware but give her some biphobia. There’s something we haven’t seen before.
I mean, the mystery isn’t really a mystery if anyone saw the original ending of the film that test audiences didn’t like.
Is it possible to see the original ending where Alex frames Michael Douglas for her murder? Is it a DVD extra or something?
Yes, it was on the DVD. You see the police arrest him for her death and then it shows what really happened and she’s committing suicide.
Here you go, I found it.
You may have just cracked the case and cleared Dan’s name, RobNYC. Hell of a job!!
It is a pretty obvious ending too. Let’s hope they have something else in mind.
I saw the original when I was in college in the 1980s. A somewhat compromised guy just has bad luck picking his mistress? It was a great movie, but it certainly was not nuanced. Douglas stuck his dick in crazy and that’s what he got in the end. The only reason why the movie is so good is because of Glenn Close. Anyone could have played Douglas’s role…Costner, Cruise or Ford.But I do like Caplan very much, and it would be very nice to see Alex’s back story; so that she was not just a one dimensional smoking fuck.
This makes it sound a lot more interesting than a straight remake. Plus, Toby Huss.What is it with Joshua Jackson in shows about dudes having affairs?
Ha, that’s funny. I think it’s got something to do with the shit-eating grin that he can do. He’s really good at playing guys whose confidence deflates in an instant.
Sometimes I just like the cast of something so much that I’m gonna watch it no matter what the reviews say.
I felt the same way about this. I’ll watch Pacey Witter in anything.
I actually just finished rewatching “Dr Death”. He was so goddamn great it that. Everyone was. One of the best true crime miniseries I’ve ever seen. Maybe the best medical one. The whole cast was just phenomenal, and the writing and direction were incredibly engaging. I wish more people had seen it.
Dr. Death was great! I’m also surprised that more people didn’t watch it. Excellent cast and it’s the kind of true story that should scare the shit out of everyone. Joshua Jackson was excellent in it and I loved the dynamic between Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin.
I loved it. They interviewed Christian and the doctors he and Alec played in the podcast, I can’t remember if Joshua was interviewed for it. I like to go back and watch Joshua in Fringe, too.
Since Pacey and Janis Ian are in it, I am contractually obligated to watch.
Then check out “The Last Thing He Told Me” Jennifer Garner series on Apple Plus. The cast is full of great people, but the writing is so bad. And it includes every cliche in the lady thriller book checklist. I’ve so far called every plot twist in that mess so I guess I’m hate watching it just to prove I’m correct. I couldn’t figure out why Josh Singer (The West Wing, Spotlight) was involved til I found out he’s married to the woman who wrote the “best selling book”. Are there any books that aren’t best sellers these days? You’d think he would have helped her with the dialogue, it’s so bad it’s laughable.
First Annie Wilkes, now Alex Forrest. Are you trying to tell us something, Lizzy?
Just another in a long line of manic pixie dream girls.
In my era of open relationships, fluid sexualities and pretty much chilled out expectations this looks to me like science fiction.
I think I was 10 when the VHS of the original movie materialized in the short row of movies my mom had bought, so I’ve got a whole weird coming of age set of memories attached to this film. The movie gets some short shrift based on some bad choices made by the producers. Specifically Close’s Forrest being turned into a movie monster and Douglas’ Gallagher being made overly sympathetic. It’s a great movie from a structural narrative standpoint, and it’s problematic themes and characterizations are a great time capsule. That’s another way of saying that podcasts *about* this movie are maybe better than the movie, and definitely required listening for a revisit (You Must Remember This is a great deep-dive into the long-twisting road of what happened to the original story that’s more about an asshole getting what’s coming to him when he is thoughtless and cruel to the women in his life).That’s a long way of saying, I’m looking to watching this retelling. Are they going to address some of these changes and make a more interesting take on the Alex Forrest character? I hope so. It sounds like they are still focusing on making the Dan Gallagher character sympathetic (and Joshua Jackson suggests they are trying to make him likable), so I’m concerned. But I may be one of the few people wandering the earth that thinks there’s a much better version of the story than the one that ended up in Adrian Lyne’s 1987 film.
I am starting to think they took the plot points of Fatal Attraction, (family man has affair with mentally disturbed woman, things go very badly) mixed them with the plot of the Presumed Innocent movie starring Harrison Ford, (prosecutor has affair with coworker, she ends up dead, he’s a suspect, his best friend is a cop who helps him solve murder, he figures out his wife killed his lover) and this is what they came up with. Altho Harrison’s character didn’t confess to a murder he didn’t commit. From that theory, I surmise that Beth killed Alex. I know it’s a stretch, but the latest episode ended with Dan confessing to Beth, so Beth knows who Alex is as she came to the open house. Or Alex pulled a Gone Girl and killed herself to frame Dan. TWIST! PS I don’t get how the young actress who played Leia in Obi Wan Kenobi (young Ellen) turned into an Ana de Armas look a like when she grew up.