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Fascination (2004)
Film Noir in Sunny Setting
"Fascination" is a film that really delights in circumventing, undermining and blatantly avoiding your expectations - and I mean that as a compliment.
The movie starts out not with a murder but with an accident: Patrick Doherty, wealthy businessman, goes for a swim and never comes back well, not alive that is. His body is thrown on the rocks of his beach-front property. Cause of death: drowning.
His son Scott (Adam Garcia) deeply mourns his father's death; but when his mother (Jacqueline Bisset) announces marriage-plans soon after, his mourning turns to something darker, deeper, maybe Oedipal. His new step dad's sexy daughter has an even darker suspicion: could their parents have killed his dad and maybe some years earlier maybe her mother.
The two step-siblings quickly fall in lust and investigate but this thriller-turn doesn't even do justice to what director Klaus Menzel keeps brooding beneath the surface. Nobody can be trusted. Love without trust is impossible but, boy, does it make for hot sex!
In the end we don't even care who killed whom but we deeply care about the love-story. It's not about Scott getting the girl, but if he will be foolish enough to lose her. She might not be trustworthy, but she's certainly the hottest alleged murderess since Sharon Stone got hold of an ice-pick.