Anyone who watches romantic thrillers knows what to expect. This is precisely why we watch. The goal is not to be surprised so much as it is to have our suspicions confirmed. These films promise to reward us for our anticipation. With the rise of Black-led romantic thrillers, however, audiences are often asked to suspend our disbelief in more ways than one. Unlike the increasingly popular, so-called “Black social thrillers,” such as Get Out, Us, and Luce, the Black romantic thriller is rarely authored by Black screenwriters themselves. Thus, these films rarely ask audiences to look closer or engage critically where race, class, gender, and sexuality are concerned. Instead, Black romantic thrillers — the likes of which include Obsessed, When The Bough Breaks, The Perfect Guy, The Intruder, etc. — take part in an especially sinister seduction with regard to genre. Centering narratives of Black women leading idyllic upper-middle-class lives, more often than not, these films allow little to no consideration for the ways race, class, and gender inform one’s exposure to violence and relationship to safety.
As a genre, the thriller hinges on the idea of violence as sensational and temporary rather than pervasive and recurring. Yet, the lives of Black women and girls threaten this very narrative structure. According to a 2017 CDC report, Black women experience domestic violence and homicide at higher rates than any other group in the United States. With these conditions in mind, a romantic thriller with a Black woman lead is perhaps faced with the subversion of the genre itself. After all, the thriller cannot exist without an established narrative of safety. To write about Black women and intimate violence would require a troubling of “safety” as it stands. For failure to do so, the Black romantic thriller, in its efforts to meet the demands of a stifling genre, often struggles to fathom violence without contingency.
Still, even in their insecure position within the genre, these Black romantic thrillers are instructive in their commitment to form and tradition. Following the usual scripts one might associate with the white canon of suburban heterosexual thrillers — The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female, Sleeping with the Enemy, etc. — Black romantic thrillers are especially loyal to the class obsessions of the genre despite their racial mutiny. The latest addition to the canon, the 2020 Netflix original Fatal Affair, was directed and co-written by Peter Sullivan alongside Rasheeda Garner, a Black screenwriter who was not brought on to the project until the film’s lead actress Nia Long was formally cast. Over the course of the film, in which a short-lived flirtation threatens a Black woman’s carefully curated security, we are reminded once more of the romantic thriller’s function as a class vehicle.
Following an opening scene in which an unnamed Black woman and her white lover are murdered under mysterious circumstances, Fatal Affair begins with a transition from passion to peril. Refusing to linger in any scene for too long, the film swiftly cuts to the title sequence once blood is spilled. We leave behind the butchered lovers and meet our protagonist, Ellie (Long), a successful attorney whose life and marriage are turned upside down when she reunites with an old college acquaintance named David (Omar Epps). Notably, before we see Ellie on screen, we are made to sense her world. In this secondary opening, Ellie’s Lexus drives smoothly down a scenic road, introducing the audience to the coastal views leading up to her Northern California home.
Throughout Fatal Affair, much of Ellie’s identity is signaled through these visual and narrative cues. Inscribing class through setting and character background, Ellie’s home, career, and her hybrid SUV all serve as class indicators. In lieu of true character development, an assortment of corporate blouses, pencil skirts, luxury cars, a law degree, an elaborate beachfront property, and intense phone calls about legal briefings are meant to set up the sartorial and social landscape of Ellie’s world. Constructing a classed notion of comfort, these signifiers serve to establish Ellie as a person accustomed to the kind of safety money can buy. Relying heavily on these markers of social and economic stability, it is the disruption of this “paradise” that pushes the story forward.
Though she appears to be the only Black woman in her position at her legal firm, it is clear that Ellie has made a comfortable life for herself. At least, this is true until David, an “unofficial” tech consultant is hired by her firm. A computer hacker by trade, David’s skillset relies largely on undermining digital boundaries and undoing privacy. Utilizing these skills to support the legal and corporate interests of his clients, David also appears to be a highly successful member of his field. Nonetheless, having harbored a crush on Ellie that has endured since their collegiate years at Stanford, we soon learn that David intends to hack into Ellie’s private life.
Upon reuniting, David is adamant about catching up with Ellie who is hesitant about their reunion. After wearing her down, David finally convinces Ellie to grab a drink with him. But, after a sloppy make-out session, Ellie, a married woman, cuts the premature affair off at the knees and proceeds to avoid David for the remainder of the film. Incensed by this rejection, David goes on to terrorize Ellie in her personal and professional life. As it stands, the plot of Fatal Affair includes all of the typical narrative trappings of the romantic or psychosexual thriller: infidelity, a blind-sided spouse, dead secondary characters, a long stakeout scene, several incidents of trespassing, and a dramatic free-falling death for the film’s antagonist.
While this formula may teach us very little about the inner lives of the film’s characters, a close reading of these clichés compels us to consider what lies at the root of the romantic thriller. As Fatal Affair demonstrates, what is integral to the genre is neither its characters nor their intimate relationships, but rather its setting and circumstance. In order to turn the domestic world into a site of terror and unrest, the writers of these films must first indicate that a “safe” domestic world even exists. But the question remains: if the disruption of safety is what constitutes the thriller, how can the genre account for those of us on the margins of the “safe” worlds it constructs? For those who live precariously, with limited financial means and without social protections, the thriller veers into the realm of fantasy. Our escape into these films ends when the reality of vulnerable life brushes up against the genre’s insistence on rosy world-making.
Toward the end of Fatal Affair, David decides to fake his death so that he might stalk Ellie without any further suspicion from local police. In a rapid sequence of events, the film’s antagonist kills a homeless Black man who is asleep on the beach. To use him as a decoy, David burns the man’s body to the point of no recognition. A few scenes later, in a ploy to get Ellie away from her home, David kills her assistant, a Black woman named Linda (Estelle), and intercepts her work messages in order to call her back to the office late at night. After driving out into the city, Ellie arrives at her job to find her assistant, a lower-level employee at the firm, brutally murdered without explanation. In an effort to establish David’s escalating violence, Linda, not unlike the homeless Black man before her, is abruptly discarded, her life carrying no significance beyond the shock her death was intended to induce.
In these two parallel scenes, we are shown that poor and working-class Black people are peripheral yet instrumental to the film’s narrative of upper-middle-class Black life. Where David’s numerous attacks on Ellie and her family’s safety constitute major narrative developments in the film, the off-screen murders of the homeless man and Ellie’s assistant are understood to be casualties of the greater plot — their deaths are but a means to an end.
In reckoning with the narrative disposability of these two characters, especially the homeless man, a critique of the thriller genre springs forth. As a person resigned to sleeping on a private beach, is it likely that this unnamed homeless character would have found himself faced with violence at the hands of the police if our film’s serial killer had not reached him first. The imperiled conditions of this man’s life are the reality that lies beneath the dreamy lifestyle our lead character inevitably recoups by the end of the film. The enticing beach views Ellie enjoys from the comfort of her home can only be secured through the privatization of land, which begets policing. As the protectors of capital, police make the constructs of safety and privacy possible for Ellie, just as they threaten the homeless man’s right to sleep oceanside. Though it is not addressed in the film, this narrative choice to murder the homeless man reminds us that privatized safety anywhere is often predicated on violence elsewhere.
Unlike Fatal Affair, in its exploration of intimate violence, Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out does not shy away from the racial and gendered fantasies that shape its “safe” white upper-middle-class setting in upstate New York. For the film’s lead, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black photographer, the very metrics by which this wealthy community negotiates safety and security are, in fact, what endangers his life. Neither the police, the familial unit nor his romantic partnership with Rose (Alison Williams) — all of which might serve as the narrative ingredients of a traditional security blanket within the genre — can offer Chris true protection. Ultimately, the threats that these social formations pose to Chris’s life can only be combated by his communal ties. At the end of the film, Chris is saved by none other than his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), a Black TSA agent who notably does not incorporate the state in his heroic rescue mission.
Where most films of the thriller genre reinforce the power of the state, the police, and the romantic union as the pillars of a secure life, Get Out offers up friendship — a kinship tie that is not validated or recognized by outside institutions — as a tool of Black survival negotiated outside the bounds of public safety. In this way, the film’s commitment to social commentary throws into stark relief the tropes that dominate romantic thrillers. A test to the genre as it stands, Peele’s debut film asserts that the Black thriller, in particular, has the unique potential to undermine “safety” as a socio-economic construction. Fatal Affair, however, fails to investigate the precariousness of Black life, and instead, like so many of the Black romantic thrillers before it, simply reifies troubling classist tropes. In James Baldwin’s 1961 collection of essays Nobody Knows My Name, the inimitable Harlemite wrote, “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.” With Baldwin’s words in mind, one might ask whether any art interested in the “breakup of the world” must first interrogate the notion of security itself. Where the thriller is concerned, this is, of course, the question at the crux of the genre. Thus, while a good thriller might flirt with this inquiry, a great thriller ought to, in the words of Black literary scholar Rich Blint, “court the end of safety” altogether.
