nvasapper Review of Fatal Desire

Fatal Desire (2006 TV Movie)

Looking for love in all the wrong places

[10/10 · 4 April 2006]

I saw this film last night when it premiered on the Lifetime network and was very impressed with it. It was absolutely superb from start to finish. It stars Eric Roberts and Anne Heche, two excellent actors who give a tour de force performance here. To say that their performances are outstanding would be an understatement. They played their respective characters with such realism and believability, I almost forgot that I was just watching a movie. Based on a true story, the film explores the perils and pitfalls of looking for romance on the Internet. In this, it shares a similarity with another film that Lifetime showed in 1993. That film was called "Dying To Love You" starring Tracy Pollan. Although that film used the personal ads medium as its hook instead of the Internet, the idea was basically the same- lonely divorced father meets beautiful woman with tragic results. In "Fatal Desire", Eric Roberts plays an ex-police detective from Rhode Island now working as a pit boss at an Atlantic City casino. He starts an e-mail relationship with Anne Heche, who plays a married woman named Tanya Sullivan living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her young daughter and a husband whom she says abuses her. When they finally meet in person, they're very obviously smitten with one another and consummate their relationship right away. Heche's character displays a certain edginess hinting at a possible mental instability. Nonetheless, Roberts falls in love with her and tries to convince her to divorce her husband so they can be married. She tells him that's not an option and that her husband found out she was fooling around and beat her bloody. The photos she e-mails Roberts, showing her bruised and battered face, seem to bear out her story. To put the icing on the cake, she tells Roberts that her husband also hired two men to beat and rape her as well. Roberts tells her he's going to take care of the problem and she gives him directions to the auto salvage yard where he works. After "taking care" of the problem, Roberts finds that Heche has cut off all communication with him- no e-mails, no phone calls, nothing. The police initially treat what happened as a burglary gone bad. The film takes a few neat twists and turns here when Roberts finally confronts her in person. Another twist involves payback from beyond the grave, though not in a supernatural sense. And the last is in the revealing of Tanya's personality- and it isn't pretty. What she does in the last scene, when being interrogated at police headquarters, is quite unnerving and will leave a chill running down your spine. This is a phenomenal production and I give it a 10 out of 10, hands down.