Unwritten Obsession (2017)

(In French, On TV, November 2022) As someone who knows a lot of professional fiction writers, a guilty pleasure of mine is watching movies about authors and wondering why the profession is so misrepresented on the big screen. Never mind the neurotic writer unable to cope with the real world—that’s the least insulting way the movies portray novel writers. Far more common is the writer who seems incapable of having an original thought, and is incapable of writing until something happens to them in real life. Far more ludicrous (yet fairly popular) are portrayals of a “writer” as someone without original ideas… who ends up plagiarizing the work of other better writers. Unwritten Obsession is a cheap made-for-Lifetime “thriller” that begins with the portrait of an unlikable writer in search of inspiration (and money) after the suicide of her boyfriend, clearly stuck in a big house without means to pay for it. (This is your first clue that the main character is an unlikable idiot.) She reluctantly agrees to mentor a younger woman for petty cash, and then things get out of control as secrets are revealed and the two women come to blows. Stuck with a ludicrous script, director David Martín Porras’s Unwritten Obsession never once makes sense—aside from the stealing-manuscript thing that can be seen far in advance, it fails to address any questions about, “Well, what did she think was going to happen?”  The hidden catch to any “stole the manuscript and published it as my own” premise is how much work it is to be an author beyond just having a manuscript—the re-edits demanded by the editor, the ancillary writing required for it, and the sheer luck of any manuscript becoming a published novel -let alone a commercially successful one. A manuscript is not a treasure chest you can cash in immediately—and that’s before we get into the monumental egos that writers have about their work and how they love just pointing at a book to say, “That’s mine.” But such practical concerns are, frankly, not even the main reason why Unwritten Obsession is a terrible film. Unlike many straight-to-Lifetime films, this one is not fun at all. The protagonist is a terrible person, and while the antagonist may have some moral justification, she’s still a psycho armed with a sickle. That the protagonist gets away with her deception is another nail in the film’s coffin—at that point, you may be forgiven for asking what was the point of it all, and Lifetime movies are not equipped for ironic finales. The utter seriousness of the entire thing (despite its ludicrousness) is another issue: there’s scarcely any moment-to-moment enjoyment of the film, and considering it leads nowhere then why bother?