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Dear Sirs,
Eileen McGinley and Andrea Sabbadini (2006) give a beautiful and precise analysis of a rich film, with a clear demonstration of basic psychological impulses and defenses in human personality. I would like to add some ideas coming from another vertex (in the Bionian sense of the term).
The main character, Evelyn, is shown to be a woman with a poor sense of identity. She has a weak and fragile ego related to a harsh and severe superego, a dynamic found in every psychotic state. Probably her mother also had a weak ego, without what might be called a capacity for holding (Winnicott), reverie (Bion) or empathy (Kohut). It is likely that her father was a severe and strong patriarchal figure, both admired and feared by the girl. He would be for her either an idealized or a persecutory object due to her shift towards the schizoparanoid splitting mechanism (Klein) in organizing experience (Ogden), from which came her regressive behavior when the ‘idealized object’ was projected on to the male radio presenter, who, in her preferred program, plays her favorite music, thus giving rise to her perverse and obsessive adoration.
As always happens in these dynamics, when the object resists attempts at control by the subject, adoration is transformed into hatred, with murderous feelings in this case towards the object's girlfriend. In this pathological situation, the outcome is potentially dramatic, and the plot unfolds with Evelyn discharging her strong destructive feelings against everybody who has relations with the man on whom she has become so dependent as to be willing to have a symbiotic fusion (Mahler) with him. The termination is her own death by falling from a cliff in her fight with Garver, the formerly beloved, now hated, radio presenter.