Like Indecent Proposal, this is one of those ’80s movies that spawned a zillion articles, and about which I’ve read and heard a ton… but which I’ve never seen until now. Also like Indecent Proposal, it’s not very good.

So the main problem with this movie is that Glenn Close’s character is just absolutely absurd. Like, she’s a successful professional in her 40s with a fairly put-together life when we meet her, and yet then we’re supposed to believe that after one (1) night with Michael Douglas, she is so deeply dependent on his affection that when he attempts to leave the next morning she literally slits her own wrists.

That isn’t plausible. It has no ring of truth. You can’t imagine a person acting like that. Even in a “heightened for drama” sense, it just doesn’t work. You can imagine someone who reads too much into a casual encounter, you can imagine someone who is jealous of their lover’s spouse, you can imagine someone who feels slighted and wants revenge. But that? It just doesn’t ring true.

And so the same feeling occurs throughout the movie, as Close ramps up her campaign of harassment. Her actions are “scary” not because they’re recognizable things that a jilted lover might do, ramped up to 11; but because they’re things The Joker might do, and they only make sense in comic book logic.

Like, take the famous rabbit scene. It’s a big horrifying reveal, but think about what Close actually did here. She drove out to Douglas’s house, then I guess scouted around the periphery of the yard to see what was on the property, and found the rabbit hutch. At which point, she opened the rabbit hutch, grabbed the bunny, and wrung its neck (probably getting all scratched up in the process, animals are vicious). Then she snuck up to the house, made sure nobody was in the kitchen, and quietly dug around in their cabinets to find a stewpot, hoping they had one big enough. Finding it, she put it in the sink, threw the rabbit corpse in, and filled it up with water (while hoping that nobody was hearing this or coming from the other room). Then she turned on the stove, set the pot on to boil, and left.

None of that makes any sense. If she wanted to make the point that she was in Douglas’s house, there are more direct ways to do it. If she wanted to hurt him, if she wanted to see him, if she wanted to scare him… no matter what she wanted to do, there’s an easier way to get there, one that doesn’t require this elaborate set of weird actions. This scene exists because they wanted the gross-out reveal, not because it could ever happen.

And so when you’ve got a movie where the core character is entirely a screenwriter’s conceit (and I’m passing over it lightly here, but let’s face it: is a misogynistic projection of how women could be scary from the male screenwriter and director), then there’s no point talking about the characters’ actions or motivations or thoughts beyond that. The movie has no interior reality, it’s just an amusement park ride, and not a very interesting one.

As an aside, one of the things this movie really drives home is how awful the home-phone era was. Whenever Close decides to call Douglas’s house, the phones ring really loudly. They have a phone next to their bed, and she can just wake them up at 2 AM any night she wants. And then also anyone in the house can and will answer, so all calls for Douglas could end up going to his wife or kid. And then also also, there’s no way to put a number on your ignore/block list, so if anyone has your number, they can just keep calling you forever. It’s all deeply horrific, and they should have spent less time with rabbit killing and more time just exploring the nightmare implications of that era’s telephony.