Obsession

Brian De Palma directed this 1976 mystery thriller from a screenplay by Paul Schrader. It was his sixth film as director, following Carrie the same year, and it came before The Fury in 1978. Cliff Robertson plays Michael Courtland, a prosperous New Orleans businessman. After his wife Elizabeth and young daughter are lost in the aftermath of a kidnapping in 1959, Courtland rebuilds his life without them. Sixteen years later, while traveling in Italy, he meets Sandra Portinari, a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his wife. Geneviève Bujold plays both women, and John Lithgow appears as Courtland's business associate Robert Lasalle. The film was shot in Italy and the United States, and it runs 99 minutes.

The production was modestly budgeted at about 1 million dollars and returned roughly 4 million worldwide, a profitable result for its scale. It sits among the director's early thrillers, made between two films that helped define his reputation in that genre. On TMDB it holds a rating of 6.7/10 from 332 votes, while the critics' rating stands at 6.4/10 from 26 reviews, a narrow gap that suggests general audiences and reviewers responded to it in broadly similar terms. The credited cast numbers twenty.