The article argues that Brian De Palma’s 1976 thriller ‘Obsession’ can be read as an unintended allegory for fears surrounding artificial intelligence. Its themes of identity, replication, grief and manipulation are said to resonate with contemporary anxieties about technology recreating people and exploiting emotional vulnerability.

Although made decades before modern AI, the film centres on a man haunted by the loss of his wife and daughter who becomes entangled with a woman resembling his late wife. The article presents this resemblance and the resulting deception as a useful parallel to AI-generated likenesses and synthetic intimacy, while stressing that the connection is interpretive rather than an explicit intention of the filmmakers.