Body Chemistry
Body Chemistry wants to be dangerous. It flirts with ideas that would make Fatal Attraction blush. But it keeps chickening out.
Marc Singer plays Dr. Tom Redding, a married scientist studying sexual response. Enter Dr. Claire Archer, played by Lisa Pescia, a visiting researcher with funding and an agenda. She’s his boss, more or less. She seduces him. She dominates him. There’s even a shower scene that suggests she—well, use your imagination.
This is interesting territory. Claire isn’t Glenn Close’s jilted lover from Fatal Attraction. She’s the one with power. She initiates. She controls. The film glimpses something ahead of its time, something closer to what Basic Instinct would explore two years later: a female predator with absolute agency.
Then it loses its nerve.
Suddenly Claire is leaving hundreds of phone messages and stalking Tom like every spurned mistress from every thriller you’ve seen. The transformation makes no sense. You can feel the movie buckling under the weight of convention, trying to stuff a sexually dominant woman into a Fatal Attraction box.
The script is at war with itself. Consider this: There’s a party scene where Claire threatens to tell Tom’s wife. Tom, fed up, tells her to go ahead. His wife overhears. She steps out, calmly stares Claire down, and escorts Tom inside. It’s understated and effective.
The very next scene? Tom’s wife confronts him in the kitchen as if none of that happened. She’s shocked, learning about the affair all over again. Singer’s performance goes full melodrama—think The Room levels of cringe. Someone made two different movies and accidentally kept both versions.
Singer isn’t terrible. At his best, he channels Kevin Bacon’s everyman quality. But he can’t handle the emotional extremes. Push him too high and he becomes unintentionally comic. Ironically, he’s best when the film lets him go feral in the finale, all gritted teeth and coiled rage. Even then, when he storms Claire’s apartment and slugs her with a laughable haymaker, I guffawed. Director Kristine Peterson seems more comfortable staging sex than violence, and it shows.
The film does have moments. Claire sending Tom a sex tape disguised as a children’s video for his young son—that’s genuinely disturbing. Those glimpses of what Body Chemistry could have been make its failures more frustrating.
It spawned three sequels, so someone was watching. And give it credit: In some ways it pushes further than Basic Instinct ever did. But this is a movie that can’t commit. It gestures toward transgression, then retreats into camp. It wants to evolve the erotic thriller, but it’s shackled to the formula.
What remains is a curious artifact. Not quite bad enough to dismiss. Not brave enough to recommend. Just a film perpetually at war with itself, never quite becoming either the movie it wants to be or the one it’s forced to be.