Netflix's latest smutfest has all the subtlety of an American soap opera

"Kneel, and I’ll give myself to you,” commands the heroine of Netflix’s latest smutfest, Obsession. The polished parquet towards which poor Richard Armitage’s bare buttocks are then shown descending doesn’t look awfully comfy.
But then, nothing sits quite right about this 21st-century adaptation of Josephine Hart’s 1991 bestseller, Damage. Older readers will remember the book (and subsequent film starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche) as the Fifty Shades du jour – only darker and much more elegantly written. It told the taboo-busting tale of a 50 year old doctor-turned-politician called William who risked everything for an all consuming, sado-masochistic affair with his son’s enigmatic fiancée, Anna.
The Irish author – whose three siblings all died before she turned 18 – used the story to interrogate the ways in which trauma affects love and sexuality. Anna had been psychologically scarred by shocking events in her childhood. “Damaged people are dangerous,” she warned her lover. “They know they can survive.” But this new version – chopped awkwardly into four short episodes – opens with all the subtlety of an American daytime soap opera.
No longer the remote, middle-ranking success of Hart’s original, Armitage’s William is a flashily successful brain surgeon. We meet him in his high-tech operating theatre as he completes the groundbreaking separation of conjoined twins, making headlines around the UK before slipping home to be seduced by his brilliant and sexy barrister wife (Indira Varma).
Once we’ve established this alpha couple have a beautiful home (and her father owns a stately pile in the country where they spend weekends with their beautiful grown-up children), we’re whisked off to a work party where William locks eyes with Anna (Charlie Murphy). In a comically cringeworthy scene he wordlessly inserts a rather small, grey cocktail olive into her open mouth. And the romps begin.
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