It’s easy to understand how Leah (Sanaa Lathan) could get ensnared in the web of The Perfect Guy (2015)’s titular villain even if our own inner alarm bells are going off before he’s spoken five lines. Shortly after this mechanical erotic thriller opens, she dumps her boyfriend of two years, Dave (Morris Chestnut), because she’s out of patience to keep waiting to be the woman who has it all. She’s great at her handsomely paying lobbyist job, but she’s 36 and desperately wants kids and a marriage — things Dave also wants, but not as soon as she’d like. So when the first man who shows romantic interest in her comes into her life about two months after the split — he’s an IT professional named Carter (Michael Ealy) with impossibly dreamy eyes — she goes all in even when he hasn’t done much except be very handsome and dispense romantic phrases with the efficiency of a robot who’s been trained to.

Not long after Leah’s brought Carter home to her parents — something she didn’t even do with Dave — she finally gets that something is off. While the two are stopped at a gas station, Carter, who’d been paying inside, brutally beats a man who’d been admiring his car while Leah sat in the passenger seat. All she can do to stop it is scream bloody murder until the gas station’s manager comes out with a cocked gun. Leah’s smart enough to know that a second chance after such a scary blowup is unwise, but Carter, predictably, isn’t having it when she unhesitantly breaks things off. He starts following her around, showing up at her favorite coffee shop and workplace — and that’s not even including all the frantic calls and texts — pleading his case. 

The police say they don’t have enough evidence for Leah to file a restraining order. Not after Carter has definitely catnapped her beloved orange tabby, not after he manages to hack into her phone and computer and does what he will with both, but after he’s left a note that says, “If I can’t have you, no one will” on her car. That’s naturally preceded by a stalking session in an empty parking lot at night that, like everything else in the movie, is so underlit that you can barely make out what’s happening. (It might have done the movie’s cinematographer, Peter Simonite, some good to watch a few Val Lewton-produced horror films to see how shadowy lighting can work to your benefit rather than plain and simply frustrate your viewers.) 

Sanaa Lathan in The Perfect Wife.

In hindsight, The Perfect Guy, a microwave-heated callback to something along the lines of Fatal Attraction (1987), slots in with a late-2000s slash early-to-mid-2010s erotic-slash-domestic thriller revival partly defined by movies like Obsessed (2009), Stranger by the Lake (2011), Passion (2012), Double Lover (2014), A Bigger Splash (2015), The Boy Next Door (2015), The Handmaiden (2016), and When the Bough Breaks (2016). (The 50 Shades trilogy, though not really thrillers, feel like they belong in this group, too.) 

The best of these films posed similar amounts of salacious fun at the movies as their predecessors had. But they were more interested in subverting the white dominance and heterosexism of the erotic-thriller heyday of the late-1980s and early ’90s. Homosexuality wasn’t as readily filtered through the straight male gaze the way something like Basic Instinct had been (Stranger by the Lake and The Handmaiden are among the rejoinders), and people of color were able to play the leads rather than be relegated nearly exclusively to supporting players (Obsessed, The Boy Next Door, The Perfect Guy, When the Bough Breaks). 

This isn’t to say that these neo-erotic thrillers were wont to do anything deep — their ’80s and ’90s forebears certainly weren’t either as they often sillily contemplated what could happen if you slept with the wrong person. But there seemed to be a stunted realization from executives that you could successfully resuscitate public interest in a once-lucrative genre that had gotten old fast a few decades earlier by tweaking familiar stories and shining a light on people who had beforehand been kept in the genre’s periphery. “As Hollywood abandoned the mainstream adult thriller to chase billion-dollar tentpole films or Academy Awards, it left a void that the makers of Black thrillers were happy to exploit,” the writer Tre’vell Anderson posited in the Los Angeles Times in the 2016 feature “When the Bough Breaks and the Rise of the Black Romantic Thriller.” “Because you still can make money on movies for grown-ups.” 

Morris Chestnut and Sanaa Lathan in The Perfect Guy.

Anderson’s editorial was spurred by the release of When the Bough Breaks, which marked the third (and, from the vantage of 2025, obviously final) time in three years Screen Gems had released in September an erotic thriller (or erotic thriller-adjacent movie) starring Black people. The Perfect Guy made the most money at the box office of the trio and quantifiably got the best reviews (which, with its 19% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, isn’t saying much). But, gender-flipped villainy aside, it’s disinterested in doing much more than going through very familiar motions, echoing for the 2010s how, by the mid-1990s, the erotic thriller’s sexy novelty had started wearing off, the narratives getting more stale and quicker to stretch credulity in lieu of doing something new. 

The Perfect Guy’s actors seem just as unengaged with the material. Lathan, consistently typecast as intelligent and capable women without forgoing her radiance as an actress, can barely muster the energy to play a character without much dimension besides her ambition; terror; and sleek, easy-to-break-into hilltop real estate. (She does have a producer credit, though.) Chestnut is solid as a reassuringly stable man Leah knows she can turn back to. Ealy can’t rise above how one-note his villain has been written. He delivers threatening lines in monotone whispers and hisses and inevitably pales in comparison to the operatically evil blank-from-hell types seen previously in erotic thrillers (Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female, Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Demi Moore in Disclosure). 

The Perfect Guy is so paint-by-numbers that even the climax — the part where even the worst of erotic thrillers tend to spark with energy — is rushed through, barely even taking up five minutes and, like the earlier parking-garage scene, so badly lit that you’d be hard pressed to make out most of it. The Perfect Guy is a testament to how unreliable a formula can be when it’s only dutifully reheated.