Crew
Director/Screenplay – Robert Parigi, Producers – Kathleen Haase & Lawrence Levy, Photography – Sidney Sidell, Music – Nicholas Pike, Production Design – Trae King. Production Company – Base 12/Catapult Films/Visionbox Pictures.
Cast
Desmond Harrington (Kenneth Winslow), Melissa Sagemiller (Lisa Belmer), Udo Kier (Radley), Rip Torn (Novak), Brad Henke (Dotson), Robert Bagnell (Martin)
Plot
Kenneth Winslow works as a technical writer. He is given a big assignment by his boss to finish three projects within three weeks. To help him, he is assigned an assistant Lisa Belmer, although he is initially resistant to the idea. While joking around, Kenneth’s co-workers place an ad for Nikki, a lifelike sex doll, in his cubicle. Kenneth’s curiosity is pricked and he orders a Nikki doll. It comes with the options of personalising it and Kenneth chooses options to make it increasingly more like Lisa. However, as Kenneth’s relationship with the real Lisa starts to become more personal, the Nikki doll becomes more demanding and jealous.
Love Object is one of the more outlandish concepts for a film I have come across – a man’s relationship with a sex doll that comes to life. It is worth remembering that this was a couple of years before Lars and the Real Girl (2007) where Ryan Gosling develops a relationship with an inflatable sex doll, although Love Object that pushes that idea even further and has the doll come to life. There was the earlier Mannequin (1987) where Andrew McCarthy romances Kim Cattrall as a mannequin come to life, but that was a light fantasy treatment. To find a film that resembles Love Object in tone, you would have to go all the way back to the Swedish The Doll (1962), a fine film in which a lonely security guard develops a possibly imaginary relationship with a department store mannequin.
Love Object could be a version of The Doll that is conceived with a more explicit emphasis. That said, Love Object is far more crude in terms of its Disturbed Psychology – The Doll sat in a place that was constantly teasing us whether the doll coming to life was all in Per Oscarsson’s imagination or not, whereas that ambiguity has been toned way down in Robert Parigi’s direction here. Here we never actually see the doll come to life, for instance.
That said, Love Object does push into some quite perverse territory. Especially when Nikki starts acting vengeful when Desmond Harington becomes involved with Melissa Sagemiller, only for Melissa breaks up with him after she finds out about Nikki and he is forced to go back to the doll begging. This is a scene where we see Harrington crawling to Nikki on hands and knees as she wears bondage gear.
This is a film where the central idea is much stronger than the delivery on a directorial, or even a scripting level. Rather than stay with Desmond Harrington’s disintegrating mental state, the latter third of the show focuses on peripheral aspects outside of that involving nosy landlord Udo Kier or Desmond abducting the real Melissa Sagemiller and keeping her a prisoner. These scenes lack the wavering ambiguity that the earlier sections of the film creates.
Love Object was the sole directorial outing so far for Robert Parigi. Parigi has a number of credits in tv as a producer for series such as Tales from the Crypt (1989-96), Beavis and Butt-head (1993-2011), Dark Skies (1996-7), Profiler (1996-2000), King of the Hill (1997-2000) and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-2020).
Trailer here