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Sanaa Lathan Plays the Smartest Movie Stalker-ee Ever in 'The Perfect Guy' (Spoiler Warning!)

Sanaa Lathan (right) and Michael Ealy in ‘The Perfect Guy’ (Sony/Screen Gems)

It’s called The Perfect Guy, but maybe it should be called The Perfect Woman. In the new Screen Gems thriller (opening today), Sanaa Lathan plays Leah Vaughn, a foxy and successful lobbyist whose rebound relationship with gorgeous IT expert Carter Duncan (Michael Ealy) turns into a nightmare. The film follows a pretty standard stalker-movie template, complete with creepy love notes, imperiled pets, and crazy-eyed shots of Carter doing push-ups alone in his apartment. What sets it apart, however, is Leah, played with total sincerity by the always wonderful Lathan (Blade, Love & Basketball, Something New). Unlike the helpless, decision-impaired victims who often populate these movies — Idris Elba in Obsessed, Jennifer Lopez in The Boy Next Door, Bridget Fonda in Single White Female, Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, etc. — Leah handles an impossible situation with intelligence and pragmatism. And when all else fails, finds a way to take matters into her own hands.

[Warning: Major spoilers below.]

Michael Ealy makes a house call in ‘The Perfect Guy’ (Sony/Screen Gems)

At the start of the film, we see Leah break up with her longtime boyfriend Dave (Morris Chestnut) because he won’t commit to a future together. Not long afterwards, she has a chance encounter with Carter, who appears to be the total package: kind, sexy, and ready to settle down. Of course, he’s too good to be true. On the drive home from an idyllic meet-the-parents weekend, Carter has a sudden, violent outburst at a gas station and pummels a total stranger (whom he thought was ogling his girlfriend). Then Carter tells Leah he’s never done anything like that before, and says he loves her.

So does Leah give this “perfect guy” — who already wowed her parents and friends — a second chance? Nope. She gives him a chance to tell his side, but makes it very clear that his terrifying temper is a deal-breaker for her, as it should be. So she says goodbye and moves on with her love life. That’s Carter’s cue to bombard her with texts and phone calls, changing his number so she can’t block him. Once again, she doesn’t wait for disaster to strike. She does the much more level-headed thing: She goes to the police. And when Detective Hansen (Holt McCallany) tells her his hands are tied without “physical evidence,” Leah returns with a threatening note from Carter and is granted a restraining order.

Holt McCallany grills Michael Ealy in ‘The Perfect Guy’ (Sony/Screen Gems)

Of course, because Carter is a super-intelligent, extra-psychotic movie stalker, these pragmatic measures don’t fend him off. He manages to break into her home, lovingly caress her toothbrush with his lips (ew), and kidnap her cat. Soon he moves on to more consequential crimes, like sabotaging Leah’s career and casually murdering the people in her life.

Michael Ealy spends some quality time in Sanaa Lathan’s closet in ‘The Perfect Guy’ (Sony/Screen Gems)

But throughout the ordeal, Leah remains smarter than 99 percent of female characters in thrillers. She is in constant contact with the police, reporting any and all things that could lead to Carter’s arrest. And when Detective Hansen suggests that she “go away for a while” — leading, the audience presumes, to one of those big stalker-movie climaxes in a remote cabin (like The Bodyguard) or barn (like The Boy Next Door) — Leah adamantly refuses.

Instead, she asks the detective what he would do in her situation. Off the record, he advises her to get a gun and load it with bullets, plus a couple beanbag rounds that will legally constitute “warning shots.” (That’s legally murky advice, by the way, which is probably why he insists on meeting Leah someplace other than the police station to deliver it.) Here’s where she gets really proactive. Not only does Leah buy the gun, but she devises a plot to lure Carter into her crosshairs by reverse-stalking him. So she follows him around, sabotages his job prospects, breaks into his home, kidnaps back her cat, and waits for him to react.

Sadly, this table-turning twist occupies only the last few minutes of the film. It would have been a lot more fun to see Leah get the upper hand for the entire third act, ruining Carter’s life piece by piece, just like he did hers. But Leah does get her revenge at the end, shooting him with the beanbag rounds and delivering the movie’s best line. “That won’t kill me,” he sneers. “Maybe not, but I have five more like it and they will f— you up,” she replies. Then Leah hits Carter with a real bullet and he crashes, inevitably, through one of the glass tables in her perfect modernist home.

Michael Ealy eyes Sanaa Lathan in ‘The Perfect Guy’ (Sony/Screen Gems)

It’s easy for the audience to be on Leah’s side, but in truth, it’s unclear whether the movie always is. One of the stalker’s victims is Dave, the boyfriend Leah broke up with because he wouldn’t talk marriage or kids, but goes back to after her disastrous few weeks of dating Carter. (Dave is killed in a crash after Carter sabotages his car.) Is the movie saying she should have appreciated a good thing while she had it, and that Carter’s actions were some kind of karmic punishment for Leah abandoning a good man? That’s a pretty unfair view of things; it seems reasonable for a 36-year-old woman who wants children to part ways with a boyfriend who doesn’t, especially after two years together. On the other hand, maybe there’s no lesson here — just a real-world example of Leah being great at her job, which is to handle crises.

Sanaa Lathan and Morris Chestnut in ‘The Perfect Guy’ (Sony/Screen Gems)

Overall, The Perfect Guy is a little too low-key for its genre; a pulpier, more risk-taking movie would have been more fun. But the movie’s savvy treatment of Leah — which goes hand-in-hand with Lathan’s grounded, three-dimensional performance — is a pleasure to watch. If the perfect guy is out there, this character deserves him.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Perfect Guy’: