In short: Love Letters (1983)

Anna (Jamie Lee Curtis) is an up-and-coming young radio DJ for the arty crowd. When her mother dies, she discovers a cache of intense love letters from a man who certainly isn’t her a father (Matt Clark), what with their total lack of passive-aggressive sentimentality turning into drunken abuse. Anna can only assume her mother was having a decades-long affair (and who could blame her once you’ve met her husband?).

When Anna meets the considerably older (and uglier) photographer Oliver (James Keach), she feels intensely drawn to him. The feeling’s mutual as well, even though Oliver is married with kids, and they begin an intense affair. How much of this is Anna trying to repeat her mother’s love affair as her psyche’s way to help her grief, and how much proper attraction is anybody’s guess. Anna for her part becomes increasingly obsessed with this man who only ever is as much in love with her as his convenient and pleasant for him.

One of the strengths of Amy Holden Jones’s Love Letters, the film she directed right after Slumber Party Massacre (and which is still produced by Roger Corman, though you wouldn’t really think so watching it) and before she mostly scripted family friendly affairs, is that it never drifts into the misogynist sensationalism of something like Fatal Attraction, which it prefigures in many ways. The film always teeters on the edge of turning into a thriller and Anna into an interesting and complex thriller villain, but Holden Jones holds it back in admirably controlled ways, turning this into a wonderfully intense drama that goes deep into the head of its protagonist. Much of the film is using Anna’s specific troubles to explore the feeling of being a young woman, the concrete, seldom directly expressed yet all the more stifling expectations for and threats to a young woman’s inner life, as well as the shittiness of guys who really should know and be better.

Curtis graces the film with a particularly strong performance, convincing us of the intensity of Anna’s doubts, obsession and grief without going over the top yet also without underplaying.