I Would Like to See It: Compulsion

On paper, Craig Goodwill’s 2016 erotic thriller Compulsion sounds like exactly what I want out of a trip to the movies: elaborate costumes, psychedelics, graphic sex and violence, unreliable memories. In practice it’s a tepid swilling together of second-string catalog models and sensuality ranging from stale to mildly interesting. Its costumes, while gorgeous, are deployed far too thinly and artlessly, and its story is a clot of flavorless relationships and unimpressive twists. It’s Eyes Wide Shut by way of a middle-brow costume shop, its sterile sets and semi-haut couture scrabbling toward a sense of effortless money and old world mystery which only makes its own cheapness more apparent. Even the gorgeous villa in which the film takes place serves to amplify the inadequacy of its other visual components, from the ill-fitting clothes worn by its Eyes Wide Shut-esque party guests to the blandly attractive faces of its cast.

Analeigh Tipton is particularly inert as protagonist Sadie Glass, a nominal erotic author who looks like she just stepped out of a photoshoot for a GAP ad. Her utter lack of chemistry with any of her onscreen partners defuses much of the film’s eroticism, just as her ineptly wooden delivery saps the script of what little verve it possesses. Nor is Jakob Cedergren particularly compelling as Alex, a faux-menacing man of mystery and figure from Sadie’s underexplored dark past. If the film ever got any rougher than a little light choking during sex it might be able to move past the form-letter appearances of its cast and the thinness of its story and setting to at least appeal on a sensual level, but there’s simply no material in play. Even its avant garde costumes, which at their best approach the outer fringes of the legendary Eiko Ishioka’s work, are at root unimaginative personifications of ironic virginity and the killing edge of justice, too psychologically bland and abstract to provoke much of an emotional response.

Where the ritual and cold, off-putting tone of Eyes Wide Shut was an intentional product of Kubrick’s direction and indicative of the rigid, controlling joylessness of the elite, Compulsion’s nebulous ultra-rich murder party symbolizes nothing and explores no one. It’s too clean to meaningfully engage the darker regions of the human psyche and too suggestive to say anything real about repression, trapped instead in the visual and psychological realm of grocery store romance novel covers and queerbaiting prime time television. Unarguably its single best image is the sight of Alex (Marta Gastini) standing in virginal white before a sprawling tangle of dead bodies at rest in shining lakes of blood, a sight as visually delicious as any other gory delight of the past few years, but with nothing to support it or to build off its success, it might as well be a desktop background.