On the other hand, the reversal of sexes works quite well in the film’s favour. It gives it a much feminist slant, for one – and there’s some tension to the idea of the woman keeping knowledge of her lover secret from her emotionally distant husband even as the stalker’s attentions start becoming obsessive, and the horrible position she is paced in after she discovers that she is pregnant and is not sure which man is the father. The script throws in a moderate number of twists – the initial revelation after the death of Blair Underwood’s wife, where we are focused on his grief, to then discover that he is having an affair with Debbi Morgan, or the revelation that the husband has been having an affair as well.

But in the end it all pans out routinely. Actor Blair Underwood takes a producer role and clearly has some personal investment in the project. However in the role of the stalker, his performance only becomes increasingly more clichéd and one-dimensional. In fact Underwood did the whole cold, psychopathic thing far better in Just Cause (1995), which he didn’t produce. All the characters in the film seem to operate without any motivational depth beyond what the various plot turns require of them. It is impossible to believe that Blair Underwood (or any red-blooded hetero male) could act totally cold and indifferent when the gorgeously sexy Desiree Marie Velez is all over him, yet remain obsessed with the rather dowdy Morgan (who is otherwise an excellent actress – see her excellent performance in Eve’s Bayou [1997]). The film is filled with all these character short-cuts – how Blair Underwood goes from a loving, devoted family man to be revealed as someone having an affair, yet then supposedly in his grief for the other woman becomes psychopathically attached to Debbi Morgan and forgets entirely about his late wife (indeed once the stalker plot takes over the deceased wife is barely even mentioned again); or how Debbi Morgan can go from having an affair and being cold to her husband to suddenly turning back around and deciding for no particular reason to be lovingly devoted to him. Nor are we are never even given any particular reason for Blair Underwood’s obsessive psychosis. It is not that any of these things could not have been given psychologically plausible explanations with a few extra lines of dialogue; but as they are, they are character actions that exist in a vacuum.