Here is the week’s entirely innocent pleasure: a cheerfully outrageous gloss-trash erotic noir in the style that legendary screenwriter Joe Eszterhas used to crank out so lucratively in the 80s and 90s – we are plunged back into the world of Basic Instinct or Jagged Edge or indeed The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (written by Amanda Silver).

Katherine Heigl takes the creepy blondeopath role (which, in an earlier era, would have gone to Rebecca De Mornay) playing Tessa, the once-perfect wife and mother who has now been divorced for infidelity and lives near her ex-husband David (Geoff Stults). He has remarried online publishing editor Julia, played by Rosario Dawson. Tessa is furious that David and Julia get custody of her mini-me daughter two days a week and, by posing as a nice, neighbourly person, she plots to intimidate, manipulate and gaslight poor Julia, send her round the bend and get her claws back into her husband.

The plot depends very heavily on a bit of a loose attitude to online and cellphone security, but it hangs together, more or less. And there is something horribly enjoyable in Heigl’s villainous performance, along with Cheryl Ladd as her equally unsettling mother. No awards silverware for this. But a bit of fun.