Like Heigl, Dawson finds the right degree of nuance within her role, making Julia’s emotional contradictions as persuasive as her resilience, her fighter’s instinct and her smarts. Throughout the drama, but especially in the austere elegance of Tessa’s house and the vibrant sumptuousness of David and Julia’s, Nelson Coates’ character-defining production design ups the aspirational/emotional ante. Pulse-point editing by Frédéric Thoraval and the rising churn of Toby Chu’s smartly used score intensify the jitters. as well as a potential victim’s alarm amid the shadows. And no wonder Julia, afraid of looking weak or damaged, doesn’t tell David about the domestic abuse in her recent past, or the restraining order against her ex that - uh-oh - has just expired.ĭi Novi ( The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Crazy, Stupid, Love.) is more interested in the psychological than the scary, but she ratchets up the dread for effective gotcha moments, with Deschanel’s prowling camera capturing an intruder’s p.o.v. No wonder a glassy-eyed Tessa spends so much time brushing her hair before the mirror. Helen’s rigid ideas about a woman’s worth - self-hatred disguised as Botox-smoothed self-love - might seem antiquated if she weren’t spewing them in the middle of a Hollywood movie.
Played to glacial perfection by Cheryl Ladd, Helen is a forbidding figure who’s nonetheless adored by her granddaughter, with Rice a convincing innocent caught up in the matrilineal madness. (Warning to the masses: Make your passwords less obvious!)īut the screenplay by Hodson ( Shut In) also applies a thick layer of explanatory background in the form of Tessa’s hypercritical mother, Helen, showing that the poisoned apple doesn’t fall far from the twisted tree. When Tessa witnesses the rapport among Julia, David and Lily in an early scene, the director and Caleb Deschanel, her accomplished cinematographer, zero in on a look so wounded that it lays the foundation for all the gaslighting devilry to come, both IRL and online. It’s always fun to hate on a rich villain, but Di Novi and an excellent Heigl also give us the hurt beneath the monstrous surface. Thirty years later, Unforgettable flips the Fatal Attraction equation: It’s the stay-at-home mom who’s needy and deranged and the career woman who finds balance, epitomized in the warmth and humor between Julia and Ali (who both work in publishing, as did Glenn Close’s friendless character in the earlier thriller). She lives in high style without the bother of an actual job - which would only interfere with her full-time pursuit of controlling perfectionism. With her knife-straight tresses and exactingly tailored sheaths (kudos to costume designer Marian Toy, who, in contrast, dresses Dawson in flowing prints), Heigl’s unhappily divorced Tessa is the quintessential hissable blonde. Played with utter conviction, neither is as self-assured as she seems, but they’re both ready to take it to the limit as director Denise Di Novi steadily turns up the heat on a lethal bouillabaisse of sex, domesticity and juicy archetypes - a recipe that’s equal parts Fatal Attraction, Charles Perrault and Nancy Meyers. They’re the warring queens in this well-appointed fairy tale, the beloved new girlfriend and the barely tolerated ex-wife, one good and one very, very bad.
For Rosario Dawson and Katherine Heigl’s characters in Unforgettable, phony civility gives way, as it inevitably, cathartically must, to full-blown smackdown.
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