Unforgettable review: Katherine Heigl's 'psycho Barbie' thriller doesn't even qualify as camp
Director: Denise Di Novi. Cast: Katherine Heigl, Rosario Dawson, Geoff Stults, Isabella Rice, Cheryl Ladd. 15 cert, 100 mins
Meet Tessa Connover, the ex-wife of everyone’s nightmares. A noted equestrienne moving in Malibu’s highest circles, she dresses to impress, has platinum blonde hair she probably wouldn’t want you touching, ever, and does things like throw herself deliberately down flights of stairs to score victim points.
She wants her David back, but you’ll often wonder how he was roped into marrying this joyless Stepford horrorshow in the first place. Her treatment of their daughter is openly insane. And she’s all tight smiles and welcoming gifts for his charming new girlfriend – sorry, fiancée. She doesn’t know about that bit yet, and hoo boy, does it not make her day.
Tessa is played by Katherine Heigl. Of course she is. Something about Heigl was too tense, too frozen and orderly, to sustain the career in breezy romcoms she was pushed into after Knocked Up. Her management have evidently made a decision: that brittle façade of hers is worth parodying now for some thriller mileage. If the girl-next-door thing isn’t working, try “psycho Barbie” next door – she even gets called this.
If Unforgettable had been intended as a horror-comedy – something a little like John Waters’s Serial Mom – it might have been a crafty reinvention, though you doubt it could have been much funnier. Poor Rosario Dawson, as intruding stepmom Julia, makes life awfully easy for a vengeful Tessa.
Unbeknownst to David (Geoff Stults), she has an abusive ex of her own, against whom she’s taken out a restraining order. Exes! Always such disasters! Tessa creates a Facebook account on Julia’s behalf, and reaches out to this criminal sociopath to bring him back into the picture.
In a delightfully tacky bit of cross-cutting, Tessa gets her rocks off while sexting this guy online – her bathrobe sash slips undone, and all sorts – while Julia and David are having uncharacteristically bumpy sex of their own in a loo. It’s another hilarious ploy of Tessa’s to pretend that her entirely unexciting ex-husband was a wild lay, filling Julia with insecurities about her bedroom performance.
Unforgettable is the sort of psychothriller that comes back in ever tattier incarnations, like a wind-tossed scarecrow whose limbs keep falling off. What was great, trashy fun in 1992 (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, say) became your basic interracial catfight in Beyoncé’s Obsessed (2009) and now this, which has literally no suspense and can barely thrive on any level beyond campy melodrama. Cheryl Ladd definitely boosts this side of things as Granny Stepford, who brutally demands home-baked scones from Tessa as proof of good breeding.
Producer-turned-director Denise Di Novi took the reins after Amma Asante wisely bailed, and let’s just say this film certainly got produced. Presumably by mistake, it implies that sadistically violent abuser boyfriends are no match for the manipulative string-pulling of a woman scorned.
But when a scissor-wielding Tessa goes full-tilt Mommie Dearest – “Now if Julia insists on sending you home with such tangled hair…” – it’s just all too supremely silly to worry about in the least.
Famous nude scenes that were actually performed by body doubles
