Obsession

Obsession (1976) is an American psychological thriller by Brian De Palma you can watch online on iFILM. Cliff Robertson plays Michael Courtland, a New Orleans businessman who lost his wife and daughter sixteen years ago in a hostage rescue that went wrong. The bodies were never recovered. He never fully moved on.

On a trip to Florence, Michael meets Sandra — a young woman who looks, speaks and moves exactly like his dead wife. He can't walk away. De Palma builds the trap slowly: long tracking shots, a rotating camera that keeps circling as if the film itself can't escape the past, and a Bernard Herrmann score composed in direct conversation with Herrmann's own work for Hitchcock. John Lithgow plays Michael's business partner, a man whose loyalties turn out to be more complicated than they appear.

The screenplay is by Paul Schrader. Together with De Palma he constructed something that acknowledges Vertigo openly and then goes somewhere of its own — a film about obsession, guilt and the danger of wanting the past back badly enough. Stream Obsession (1976) online on iFILM.