erotic thriller

Night Nurse (2026)

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Usually, when a movie is described as “Cronenbergian,” that genre descriptor is meant as a synonym for “body horror,” focusing solely on the mutational gore effects of Cronenberg’s early calling-card works like Videodrome or The Fly. Georgia Bernstein’s debut feature Night Nurse is Cronenbergian in a different way; it’s Cronenbergian in the way that it imagines a world where any interaction can qualify as a form of sex, like the vehicular mayhem of Crash, the surgical procedures of Crimes of the Future, or the graveside mourning of The Shrouds. Specifically, Bernstein imagines a world where scamming the elderly over the phone is an intimate sexual act, rehearsed and ritualized in such a playfully heightened atmosphere that it’s more immediately recognizable as a sexual kink than it is as elder abuse. Even the opening credits play over one such phone call, with the camera leering over the scammer’s rhythmically gasping body with the same uncanny, gliding closeups that Cronenberg’s on-screen avatar examines his wife’s corpse with in The Shrouds. That phone call is, in effect, a sex scene, but everyone involved is fully clothed and the bondage gear of more typical kink scenes has been replaced with the spiraling wire rope of a landline.

Cemre Paksoy stars as the titular night nurse, a new hire at a senior-care assisted living facility in the great beige American suburbs. She’s immediately warned by the head admin (Mimi Rogers) to be wary of the home’s most notoriously misbehaved patient (Bruce McKenzie), who has a tendency to confuse the nurses assigned to him for his deceased wife, touching them inappropriately in apparent fits of dementia. That supposedly demented Lothario appears to be much mentally sharper than she’s led to believe, however, and he’s quickly revealed to be a petty conman who’s using the cover of declining health to conceal his crimes. On her very first night shift alone with him, our seemingly naive nurse is very literally roped into his schemes, wrapped up in telephone wire and pressured to play pretend that she’s the troubled granddaughter of the mark on the other end of the line — in immediate need of cash lest she be kidnapped, jailed, or worse. It proves to be a huge turn on. This same semi-scripted scenario plays out repeatedly, mark after mark, as a lucrative substitute for sexual contact between an elderly man and his youngest ingenue. Only, both the conman’s mental sharpness and the nurse’s bewildered innocence prove to be a kind of practiced performance, so the con can’t go on forever.

Besides its ability to eroticize the unconscionable, Night Nurse is also remarkably Cronenbergian in its general affect. The entire picture is rendered in uncannily flat digital plastic, and yet it excels as one of the most effective erotic thrillers made outside of France in decades. Its hushed, beige-carpeted crime spree is both oddly gentle and intensely uncomfortable. The overall mood is just as quietly mesmeric as the seductive eye contact made by its demented conman, who gradually piles up a full staff of uniformed nurses on the floor of his living room harem. Despite that extended dream-sequence atmosphere, the movie can still be astutely observational when it comes to the rituals of industrialized elder care, focusing on the physical touch of physical therapy as old men are routinely paired off with young women in a transactional simulation of traditional domesticity. The gendered power imbalance of that generational divide also exacerbates the eroticism in unexpected ways, especially when it’s flipped by a young nurse who’s turned on by the helplessness of the old man in her care, lusting after his soft skin for feeling “like a woman, like a baby.” Everyone is horny, no one’s technically fucking, and yet it plays like a feature-length orgy replayed in slow motion.

As with Cronenberg’s less showy, more cerebral works, Night Nurse operates on an extremely peculiar wavelength that can be difficult to tune into. You can tell some social taboo is being transgressed in every scene, but these wanton freaks’ sexual dynamic is so absurdly idiosyncratic that it’s near impossible to pinpoint exactly which one it is. The only specific audience I can think to recommend it to are people who wished the straight-to-Netflix crime thriller I Care a Lot had more patience & sharper fangs, and that’s only because it’s the only other vaguely sexy movie about elder abuse that I can recall. Otherwise, it’s the kind of for-weirdos-only proposition that will find its own dedicated, odious audience in due time, the same way Crash premiered to angry booing at Cannes and has since been canonized as a modern erotic classic by the freaks on its frequency.

-Brandon Ledet

Across the Hall (2009)

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While wandering the horror aisle at my local video rental place with a friend, we stumbled upon Across the Hall purely as the result of browsing alphabetically. We love the late Brittany Murphy around here, and she looked gorgeous on the DVD cover, so we decided to give this one a shot. As it turns out, this 2009 feature was the last project of Murphy’s to be released before her death. Unfortunately, it’s not very good. First and foremost, it’s not a horror film. The distinction between horror and thriller is one that can be debated (as my friend and I did after watching this movie, even though we both agreed that it was mislabeled), but this is a pretty clear example of a late-stage erotic thriller, in which an unfaithful person and the character with whom they’ve been cheating both get an unhappy ending. I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but this film is also told in anachronic order, so we know that there’s going to be a body in the hotel room from the moment that the film starts rolling, as a character known only as The Porter (Brad Greenquist) examines the taped outline of where a body slowly bled out. 

June (Murphy) is engaged to Terry (Danny Pino), but we meet her as she checks into a formerly swanky hotel. Terry calls his best friend Julian (Mike Vogel) to tell him that June’s flight was cancelled and the airline called the house. Upon learning that she was no longer going out of town for business, Terry followed her and tracked her to the hotel where he presumes she’s meeting a lover. He also confesses that he stopped at Julian’s place first, and has the latter’s gun. Julian tries to calm Terry down, and promises to be there soon. At some point later, Julian enters a hotel room, where he finds Terry holding a bound and blindfolded man at gunpoint while an unknown body rapidly cools on the ground. Elsewhere in the hotel, Julian’s sometime flame Anna (Natalie Smyka) is trying desperately to ignore the strange behavior she saw Julian exhibit earlier in the evening. Of course, then we zoom around in time a bit and learn the truth, which anyone who has seen a movie before already assumed, which is that the man with whom June has been cheating on Terry is Julian. (If you watched this on a streaming service, you also probably already saw a thumbnail of June and Julian kissing, so nice going on that one, interface devs.) Most of the film then becomes about watching Julian as he tries to prevent the inevitable violence from occurring and—when it becomes too late to stop what’s been set in motion—attempt to extricate himself from the situation without additional death, revealing his affair with June to the dangerous Terry, or legal repercussions in her death. 

There were a few interesting directions in which this could have gone. Firstly, my friend and I were of the opinion that Terry was manipulating everything, that he had already caught June and Julian in the act and had merely arranged all of this in order to kill June and have Julian take the fall for it. The clues that hinted at this were the fact that Terry got Julian’s gun specifically to confront his fiance and her lover, and that Terry was utterly insistent that Terry come and meet him at the hotel. Ultimately, Julian does end up as the fall guy, but that wasn’t Terry’s plan from the beginning, it was just a scheme that he improvised when he realized Julian was the one cuckolding him. Frankly, the planted evidence of Terry calling Julian’s cell phone, which he finds in the bedsheets of Anna’s room, and leaving a voicemail that implicates Julian as the one who’s been behaving aberrantly is flimsy at best. There’s no way that Julian is going to be convicted while Terry walks away, consequence free, despite the slow motion ending where he disappears into the crowd on the street, invisible in a hastily acquired bellhop’s uniform. This is where the audience is supposed to have their “ah-ha!” moment and marvel at Terry’s apparent masterminding, but that’s not the story that’s been told up to this point. The film simply doesn’t come together into a cohesive whole. 

That’s not to say that the individual parts aren’t praiseworthy. Although the tone and editing undermine the ending, the film is systemically tight and well constructed, even if it’s apparent that this was a script that came together under pressure to be twisty and turny rather than to have convincing dialogue. There are several very convincing misdirects, with one of the most effective being that we watch Julian as he takes two separate baths; this doesn’t become clear until later in the film, when we realize that we saw him enter his apartment bathroom earlier in the timeline, take a bath in the hotel later in the timeline, then go into the hotel bathroom to start that second bath, chronologically between those two events but placed later. It’s good stuff, and for all the things that one could conceivably complain about here, getting to watch Mike Vogel strut around in naught but a towel several times isn’t one of them. It’s also worth noting that the film is visually sumptuous, gorgeous even. A decade and a half later, you could only hope that a bargain budgeted wannabe noir like this one would look a quarter as beautiful. I had a vision of what this would look like as a 2026 production while watching the film, and it was all white and beige boxes for hotel rooms, lit flatly, cleanly, and boringly. There used to be half a dozen movies like this every year — experiments in style that might not be perfect but would be mostly considered serviceable. Instead, you end up with something like How to Make a Killing, where the budget is out of control and everything looks like it was filmed in an AirBnB. 

Perhaps the greatest crime that Across the Hall commits is that it truly underutilizes Brittany Murphy. She spends half of her screentime as a corpse, and even if that weren’t macabre in light of her real life death being so close at hand, it would still be an utter waste of a talent. What little she is given to do is good. When she confesses to Julian that she’s been fooling around with him because she needed to know for sure that the love she felt for Terry was really her own and not merely a reflection of his unflinching love for her reflecting back at him, she really sells the sweetness and softness of that moment. It’s too bad that it’s locked up in this movie, an overall experience that’s really not worth writing home about.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

New Rose Hotel (1998)

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The key to understanding the erotic thriller genre is recognizing that its main objective is not to rehabilitate narrative pornography for mainstream sensibilities, but to update noir for contemporary sensibilities. With only a few outlier exceptions like David Cronenberg’s Crash, most 80s & 90s erotic thrillers play as noir pastiche, now updated with more onscreen nudity than would’ve been allowed in the 40s & 50s. It’s just another wave of scruffy antiheroes getting in over their heads chasing the skirts of femmes fatale, ripping a few cigs and enjoying a few orgasms before their inevitable early demise. That’s why the genre’s swerve into cyberpunk aesthetics as it approached the new millennium is so difficult to fully comprehend. The tech-obsessed noirs of the late 1990s & early 2000s look forward to the genre’s cyberfuture but still speak the cinematic language of the distant past. Take, for instance, Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel: an erotic thriller about corporate espionage, in which a mysterious femme fatale (Asia Argento) dupes & dumps two doomed schemers (Christopher Walken & Willem Dafoe) who don’t recognize her as a threat until it’s too late, distracted by her movie-star hotness. Those dopes trade in corporate secrets, smuggled floppy discs, and long-distance camcorder surveillance tactics that suggest a far-out futurism, but they’re stuck reliving age-old patterns of Noir Hero archetypes from decades before their time.

Ferrara’s digicam noir strains to find old-fashioned elegance & sophistication in aughts-era techno sleaze. It’s neither the worst attempt at that kind of genre update (Swordfish) nor the best (Demonlover), but it is admirably early to the game. Walken & Dafoe’s amoral mercenaries manipulate corporate power structures by fucking with their personnel, helping R&D scientists defect from their violently territorial employers without being assassinated. Their latest target is a genius Japanese scientist they’ve been paid to convince to leave his family & job for another country, to the benefit of his employer’s competitors. It sounds like a confusing—and maybe even boring—way to make a living, but it does prove lucrative, and it affords the men a hedonistic lifestyle in all the international brothels their aging genitals can handle. At night, they are bathed in cherry-red nightclub lighting, swarmed by the chic prostitutes they both partner with & patron. During the day, they navigate monochrome beige boardrooms, scheming uncouth HR actions in a series of walk-and-talks from one skyscraper to another. These two color-coded professional spheres are linked by the voyeuristic digicam footage of their latest, greatest target in montages that look like country-hopping episodes of Cheaters. They’re also livened up by the two reliably entertaining actors, who play goofily bizarre (Walken) & bizarrely sexy (Dafoe) as convincingly as anybody.

It’s Asia Argento’s role as the sex worker recruited to woo this coveted R&D scientist away from his happy life that actually makes New Rose Hotel about something thematically, rather than aesthetically. Dafoe believes he is training his newest, hottest partner in crime to convince a foolish businessman that she loves him, but it turns out she’s already quite skilled at that. Argento is never afforded a juicy gotcha moment where she gloats over Dafoe’s duped husk, having wooed & destroyed him instead of her assigned target. Instead, she disappears halfway into the runtime, leaving him hollowed & heartbroken, confused about what happened. The back half of New Rose Hotel is one long, recursive montage, in which Dafoe’s corporate spy attempts to revisit & recontextualize his most intimate moments with Argento’s trickster vamp. Alone, he can’t decide whether to masturbate to her memory or to kill himself in despair, which just about sums up the femme fatale experience. As a standalone piece of filmmaking, this third-act rewind to previous events of the plot can be baffling in its redundancy & aimlessness. As a new mutation of noir storytelling, however, there’s something compellingly of-the-moment about its approach, especially once you consider that most of the contemporary audience would be accessing the film via VCR — which comes with its own rewind button and fuzzily worn-out sex scene memories.

As with noir pictures of any age, New Rose Hotel is mostly an exercise in stylistic cool. With a trip-hop score from Schoolly D, a hip Cat Power needle drop, state-of-the-art camcorder tech, and Walken’s jazz-jive deliveries of lines like “He’s as happy as a clam in linguine,” the entire project is all about tracking what’s cool and of-the-moment off the screen, not necessarily what’s happening from scene to scene. Those stylistic indulgences help root it firmly in its era despite its broader noir-throwback tropes, but they also make the film a little vaporous and difficult to hold onto. After its techno-futuristic novelty wears off, the audience spends an alarming amount of time trying to piece together what, exactly, is going on and whether any of it ultimately means anything. To be fair, that’s exactly the state the movie leaves Dafoe’s confused & heartbroken protagonist in, so the effect is presumably somewhat intentional.

-Brandon Ledet

Crash (1996)

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The first three scenes in David Cronenberg’s Crash are sex scenes. The fourth is a car crash. That, too, turns out to be a form of sex, but it takes a minute for the audience to catch up. We’re introduced to our central couple in peril as they’re having polyamorous sex with other partners, then meet to discuss their extramarital adventures while having sex with each other. In each case, they are in direct contact with heavy machinery, which adds to their excitement. In the first scene, a woman (Deborah Unger) has sex with her flight instructor while her cheek is pressed against the wing of the small airplane she’s learning to pilot. Next, we see her film-producer husband (James Spader) having sex with an assistant camera operator while using the tools of their trade as a makeshift mattress. Then, the married couple convenes on their high-rise balcony, overlooking a dozen lanes of endless traffic as they have semi-public sex in shameless view of the passing cars below, getting off on the exposure of their bodies and their recounted affairs. In the fourth scene and first car crash (of many), the machinery becomes more actively involved in the physical contact. The film producer drives head-on into another car, instantly killing its driver. That victim’s widow (Holly Hunter) then sensually reveals her naked breast to our battered & concussed protagonist, revealing that his highway accident was, indeed, another form of sex. He just doesn’t know it yet.

While its small cult of automotive fetishists has fixated on a highly specific turn on, Crash is the ultimate “Anything can be sex!” movie. Car crashes? That’s public sex. Kissing a freshly inked tattoo? Oral sex. Lighting a friend’s cigarette? That’s making love. Photographing a concussed hospital patient? Okay, that’s more akin to pornography & masturbation, but you get the point. James Spader’s car-horny protagonist awakes from his first crash half-alive in a hospital bed, where he’s already been scouted & recruited by the sex cult’s egomaniacal leader (Elias Koteas). The cult’s biggest outreach program appears to be a regular outdoor meeting where they recreate famous car crashes—like the one that killed James Dean—for bleachers packed with horny voyeurs. Their leader doesn’t restrict his sexual releases to those grand displays, however. His gigantic, beat-up car is both a battering ram and “a bed on wheels,” which he swerves up and down the streets of Toronto in search of the ultimate car-crash turn-on: death. His loyal followers all fuck & mutually masturbate each other in various pansexual pairings one car crash after another, until the movie arbitrarily ends during one such indulgence, no actual end to their nihilistic highway hedonism in sight. Functionally, every scene is a sex scene, and yet it seems as if the only players who achieve orgasm are the ones who die in their respective crashes, crushed under heavy metal.

It’s typical for David Cronenberg movies to be about sex, but Crash differs from his usual mode by actually depicting it. Usually, Cronenberg depicts the penetration and joining of the human body’s various orifices a kind of monstrous real-time mutation, something to fear rather than enjoy. Although a lot of Crash‘s sexual touch is mediated through heavy machinery, Cronenberg also includes plenty of direct skin-on-skin contact, embracing the erotic instead of recoiling from it. While he preserves the protagonist’s name as James Ballard—in reference to the sci-fi novelist who wrote the source material—he shifts the character’s occupation to Torontonian film producer, even depicting him slumped in a director’s chair on set. In this way, Spader plays both the author and the auteur, intertwining Cronenberg’s personal sexual hang-ups with Ballard’s cerebral perversion of daily highway driving. In the film’s best moments, he gets totally lost in the abstract hedonism of cars’ physical presence, such as the wet thudding sounds of an automated car wash or the philosophical meaning behind traffic’s ebb & flow currents. It’s all slyly funny, chillingly violent, incredibly sexy, and seemingly personal to how both of its respective authors think about sex & modernity. So, yes, anything can be sex, including a deadly car crash. How terribly exciting is that?

-Brandon Ledet

Dressed to Kill (1980)

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I had always heard Dressed to Kill discussed in conversation about transphobia in horror cinema of the past, alongside Psycho and Silence of the Lambs in that they contained some manner of attempts at empathy for their crossdressing psychosexual killers. Psycho ends with a psychological explanation for why Norman Bates did what he did, and Lambs includes a scene that explains that Buffalo Bill is not really trans; “Dr. Lecter,” Clarice says, “there’s no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive.” As society has already started walking back the hard-won rights of trans people (of which they already had so very few, you pricks) in recent years, Dressed to Kill feels like an artifact of a different time, wherein Brian De Palma, as Jonathan Demme would a decade later with Lambs, takes the time to explain that being trans doesn’t make someone crazy or evil, but also can’t help imitating Psycho in a way that feels transphobic through a modern lens. Of course, this is of a kind with De Palma’s eighties Hitchcockian thrillers; Dressed to Kill is to Psycho as Body Double is to Vertigo, after all. 

In typical Psycho format, we spend most of the beginning of the film with a woman we don’t initially realize is doomed: Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), a dissatisfied housewife whose husband fails to fulfill her sexual desires and whose young son Peter (Keith Gordon) bails on their plans to spend the afternoon at a museum together in order to work on one of his inventions. After a short check-in with her therapist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), Kate goes to the museum herself, where she and a handsome man flirt throughout the various exhibits before they grab a cab together and get up to some hanky-panky, which continues all the way up to his apartment. She leaves in a frightened state after realizing that her hook-up has syphilis and gonorrhea when she finds his notice from the state health department while looking for a memo pad to leave him a note and almost makes it out of the building before remembering that she left her wedding ring on his bedside table. When she goes to retrieve it, however, a person in a black overcoat and hat, shades, and sporting blonde hair enters the elevator with her and slashes her with a razor, quite graphically and viciously. When the elevator stops at another floor, high class call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) sees the body and screams; she reaches out to Kate as the doors start to close, catching a glimpse of the killer in the convex mirror. 

Liz ends up hauled in for questioning by scummy Detective Marino (a perfectly cast, despicable Dennis Franz), as is Dr. Elliott, who lies to Marino that he doesn’t have any clues, despite the fact that he came straight from receiving messages from both Marino and a patient named “Bobbi” on his answering machine, confessing to having stolen Elliott’s razor from his shaving kit and done something awful with it. At the police station, young Peter uses some of his audio surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on the various investigations. As Liz begins to see a woman stalking her all over the city, she eventually runs into Peter, who has been surreptitiously surveilling Elliott’s office to try and find out if one of his other patients was his mother’s killer. Can this unlikely duo stay one step ahead of the killer and figure out who they really are before the police pin it on Liz to close the case? 

We’ve already established that the film apes Psycho in its structure, starting out with a decoy protagonist who ends up killed halfway through, only to pass off the leading role to another woman. It also features multiple shower scenes in reference to Psycho’s most famous sequence, complete with showerhead closeups and murders (even if only in a dream). Kate reaches out her hand in death the same way Marion Crane did two decades prior, and when Liz picks up the murder weapon, the string section of the orchestra goes wild in a familiar way. Finally, and most notably, the killer is a man with a split personality, with “Bobbi” taking over their shared body in the same way that “Norma Bates” took over Norman’s. Where it differs is in its typical De Palma sleaziness (although recent viewings of latter day Hitchcocks like Topaz and Frenzy, which were unpleasant in a similar way, have made me question whether Hitch would have been as depraved as De Palma if he had been active in the same, morally loosened era). Kate Miller literally drops her panties in the cab ride following her cruising of the museum, and there are several sequences that spend a lot of time on loving close-ups of areolas and blonde pubic hair; this is an erotic thriller after all. 

Perhaps it’s that which makes its gender and sexual ethics feel so weird to the modern eye. The film is unusually sympathetic to sex work for its day, showing Liz as a smart woman who happens to be a prostitute; she invests in art and is even on a first name basis with her stockbroker, with whom she communicates about insider tips that her clients let slip. The film also takes the time to include a segment from The Phil Donahue Show in which the host interviews an MTF transgender person (then-contemporary term “transsexual” is used universally throughout) to establish that trans folks are just like you and me. But that all of this is present in a film that also spends so much of its runtime being sexually titillating makes the film feel tawdry in a way that trivializes its presumably sincere attempts to pre-emptively defend itself against accusations of bigotry. On the whole, it feels more old-fashioned than offensive, which is fine, because it works rather well as a suspense thriller outside of all of these elements. 

The film also feels very much like it’s in conversation with the 80s slasher boom, even if it couldn’t have been intended as such. Psycho is often cited as the prototype for the slasher genre, and with good reason, and this film was released less than twenty months after Halloween, the generally agreed upon catalyst of the next decade’s horror subgenre dominance. One of the ways that the film manages to subvert audience expectations is by having a summation sequence following the climax in which Dr. Levy (David Margulies) explains the irrational rationale of what caused “Bobbi” to split off from her main, male personality and how their shared body’s sexual arousal prompted “Bobbi” to emerge and try to destroy the objects of that desire. It’s textually very similar to the scene in which a psychiatrist explains Norman Bates’s “possession” to the survivors of Hitchcock’s film, but instead of ending in that moment, Dressed to Kill still has 10 minutes left. We get to see “Bobbi” in a hellish mental institution, where she kills a nurse and escapes to stalk Peter and Liz; Liz has another shower scene to bookend the one at the start, only to emerge and realize that Bobbi is in the room with her, then gets killed, only to awake screaming. I have no doubt that the asylum scene here was a visual influence on a similar sequence in A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors, and that double fakeout ending of “the villain escapes for one last kill” followed by “the final girl dies but it’s only a dream” is familiar in retrospect but was probably novel in 1980. 

As another Brian De Palma visual spectacle, this one is top notch. The split personality narrative is echoed in the use of countless split diopter shots that look fantastic and are perfectly suited for when they appear; a sequence in which it’s used for a close-up of Peter listening in on Det. Marino’s conversation with Elliott so that we can pick up on the details that Elliott is lying while also watching Peter’s face fall is particularly excellent. There’s also a great scene in which Elliott comes home and starts watching TV while Liz calls her stockbroker, splitting the screen between them. As we get to see both what Elliott is watching (the aforementioned Donahue interview) and his face as he does so, Liz calls her madame from a second landline in her apartment so she can negotiate for a specific amount for the night while telling her broker when to expect her with the money the next day. The screen and the soundtrack are suddenly very busy, and it feels like it’s building to a frenzy, but despite all of the overlapping dialogue and crosscutting, one never really loses track of what’s happening. It’s masterful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Shrouds (2025)

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Grief has been the major theme of horror cinema for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought.  Only David Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.
Vincent Cassel stars in The Shrouds as a David Cronenberg type: a silver-haired Torontonian millionaire named Karsh, whose grief over the recent passing of his wife has made it impossible to enjoy his life’s refinement & luxury. Only, that onscreen avatar has fully given into the modern evils that have tormented Cronenberg’s consciousness throughout his career as a public figure: the menacing intersection of technology & sex. Karsh drives around a near-future Toronto in his Tesla-brand electric car, enjoying the occasional indulgence in fine-dining extravagance while mostly spending his alone time obsessing over digital images of his dead wife. His most intimate relationship is with a cartoon A.I. assistant named Honey, and he’s struggling to suppress his sexual desire for his wife’s surviving sister — both of whom are played by Diane Kruger, the same actor who represents his wife in memories & photographs. If I were to therapize what the director is doing with Cassel’s aimlessly selfish protagonist, I’d say he’s confronting the worst-faith version of himself as a way of processing the real-life loss of his own wife. None of that is really my or anybody else’s business, though, and it’s just as likely he’s satirizing a societal malady as he is expressing a personal one.

Conceptually, The Shrouds is designed to question the fetishism & alien rituals of how we grieve our loved ones, calling attention to them in the same way that the sensation of our tongues being housed inside our own mouths doesn’t feel bizarre until the moment their presence is singled out. If it’s socially acceptable for Karsh to eroticize and mourn the loss of his wife’s physical body, how specific is he allowed to be?  If it’s romantic to miss touching his favorite of her breasts, then what is so strange about eroticizing & mourning her teeth? Would it be any stranger for him to browse .jpegs of his wife’s dental scans than it would to occasionally flip through her nude Polaroids? If all he has to remember her by is images of her body while she was still alive, would it be so strange to extend that keepsake collection to images of her body in death? Neither set of images represents her, exactly. They’re just records of the physical traits that housed her essence, which left the flesh as soon as she passed. And what of the ritual where a surviving spouse plans & purchases their funeral-lot burial directly next to their deceased lover for whenever they happen to die themselves? Why wait until death to join your spouse in your shared marital cemetery bed? What if you could stay with them every minute until your own body expires, through the portable convenience of a smartphone app?

Cassel’s Karsh is a tech-bro innovator who has disrupted the funeral service game by investing in technology that allows you to connect with your deceased loved one’s grave at any time, via app. You no longer have to fight the impulse to jump into the coffin to be buried with them, not since there are live 3D images of their corpse rotting in real time, thanks to the visual sensors of the titular future-tech shrouds. That lingering impulse to stick by his wife after her body expires commands what’s left of his erotic life: his growing tensions with the wife’s conspiracy-theorist sister, his uncomfortably flirtatious relationship with his A.I. digital assistant, and his nightly visits from the ghostly memory of his wife in declining health, which he remembers as a series of experimental surgeries he considers a form of medical adultery. Cut off from physical access to his wife’s body, he looks for its closest surviving substitutes and finds only terror, alienation, and betrayal in the pursuit. Meanwhile, the proof-of-concept graveyard showroom for his shrouds tech is vandalized, while international protestors threaten to take down his entire personal empire in a far-reaching conspiracy of circular logic & capitalist sin.

There’s no dramatic resolution or clarifying statement that ties all of these cold, alienating concepts together. Expressing unease with how technology & sex are integrated into the grief process is the entire point of the project, so it would be self-defeating to alleviate any of it. Instead, Karsh becomes increasingly paranoid & isolated in his quest to reclaim his wife’s body as a physical presence in his life, despite the impossibility of that happening, as she is dead & buried before the movie begins. The seemingly conspiratorial efforts to keep him separated from that body are their own source of erotic terror rather than a source of narrative structure, which makes for just about the strangest way this story could possibly be told. It’s a cold, philosophical rumination on the inhumanity of modern living — one that prompts you to laugh at the deadpan absurdity of its delivery before you realize just how chilling you find the implications of its bigger-picture ideas. In other words, it’s a David Cronenberg film.

-Brandon Ledet

Misericordia (2025)

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The erotic thriller is alive & well . . . in France and in France only. From François Ozon’s Double Lover to Justine Triet’s Sibyl to Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart, all of the best erotic thrillers in recent memory have been French productions, likely because the European festival circuit is the last surviving refuge for Mid-Budget Movies for Adults. Even the master of the Hollywood erotic thriller, Paul Verhoeven, had to make his most recent contributions to the genre there, in Benedetta & Elle. French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie has been a recent MVP in keeping the genre alive in particular, at least since making his beachside cruising thriller Stranger by the Lake. Lower-profile follow-ups like Staying Vertical and, now, Misericordia have kept up the eroticism of Guiraudie’s 2013 name-maker, even if they’ve strayed a little further from real-world logic into outright surrealism. Staying Vertical found Guiraudie making a Charlie Kauffman-style existential thriller about a writer’s block crisis that spirals its protagonist’s life out of control . . . with unexpected jags of menacing eroticism. With Misericordia, he’s made a surprisingly gentle, grounded variation of the Pasolini classic Teorema . . . with unexpected jags of menacing eroticism. God bless the great nation of France and all the perverts therein, Guiraudie especially.

Drawing inspiration from Terence Stamp’s angelic slut in Teorema, Félix Kysyl stars in Misericorida as a mysterious outsider who serves as the target for an entire community’s sexual desires. Only, in this case he’s not a total stranger to those many, many potential sex partners. Jérémie returns to his hometown from a life in the Big City to mourn the loss of his former employer, the town baker. He lingers beyond the normal funereal mourning process to relive his teen years in the home of the recently widowed baker’s wife, where he’s constantly bombarded by unspoken sexual advances from everyone in the small-town social circle: the widow, her priest, her son, and her son’s best friend – the last two of whom seem totally unaware that they’re even flirting. All of this social pressure and the expiration of his welcome quickly culminate in a violent crime that leaves Jérémie under surveillance & interrogation by the local cops. He spends his days halfheartedly foraging for mushrooms in the woods to appear innocently busy. Meanwhile, he’s paranoid about leading the cops to the shallowly buried evidence of his crime of passion, which has become a suspiciously fertile garden bed for off-season mushrooms. Everyone seems to know he’s guilty, but no one wants to turn him in, in case they might be able to consummate their lust for him. Yet, he can’t leave town without looking like he’s fleeing a crime scene. He’s essentially imprisoned by his fuckability.

There are no actual sex scenes in Misericorida, which sounds absurd for a Teorema riff from the director of Stranger by the Lake. It’s a low-key, autumnal thriller that propels itself with sexual tension, though, often so erotically charged in its otherwise casual exchanges of dialogue that the entire project plays like an understated prank.  There’s something undeniably perverse, for instance, when Jérémie is pressured to receive the town priest’s confession from the ordained side of the booth. Although there’s no actual sex, Guiraudie finds room to squeeze in two on-screen dicks – one limp, one erect. There’s even something slyly funny about Félix Kysyl’s costuming as Jérémie, styling the 30-something actor’s hair with an inappropriately boyish look that presents him as a kind of expired twink. Does that look say something about his arrested adolescence, possibly as a result of his past sexual tension with the now-deceased town baker? I have no idea, but it does add to the strangeness of his erotic dynamic with his more geriatric sexual suitors. In general, it’s difficult to pinpoint any specific social commentary or prescriptive point of view in Guiraudie’s work. If his quietly surreal erotic thrillers say anything about the world, it’s just that sex & violence are a constant aspect of human nature, as natural of forces as the wind blowing trees outside. For whatever reason, those winds just seem to blow harder & louder in France.

-Brandon Ledet

Babygirl (2024)

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After hearing early reports that it was not included in the pre-show package, there was a perverse thrill in seeing Nicole Kidman’s infamous AMC ad precede my local screening of her new erotic melodrama Babygirl.  It felt like getting away with something, much like how her CEO character in the film gets a thrill out of sleeping with a much younger intern.  However, no matter how much “heartbreak feels good” in a place like the corporate multiplex, it’s never felt nearly as good as the mind-shattering orgasms Kidman simulates in the film’s corporate skyscraper offices. I say “simulate” with some uncertainty, given the actor’s pull-quote confessions that she occasionally had to pause production because she didn’t “want to orgasm anymore,” an intimate experience that left her feeling “ragged” by the time the shoot had reached completion. All of this extratextual Nicole Kidman press is clouding my mind as I try to write about this movie because it’s a movie that’s partially about the actor’s icy real-world persona. Her frustrated CEO character is constantly coached by a PR team about how to present herself to the public, like an actor prepping for a press junket. During one crucial sequence, she’s plucked, injected, and flash-frozen to sculpt her already-gorgeous body into fighting shape, so she can be the public face of an upcoming, all-important product launch. The movie would mean significantly less if Kidman had not been cast as its titular babygirl, since it constantly invites you to import details from her real-life public persona into her character’s fragile ferocity as a public figure. That’s what makes its steamy, taboo sex scenes feel like genuinely vulnerable exposure for the actor – not necessarily their vulgarity.

The source & authenticity of orgasms are very important in Babygirl. The movie opens with Kidman having traditional Movie Sex with her hot, age-appropriate husband (a salt-and-pepper Antonio Banderas), simulating orgasm in their luxury-apartment marital bed. When the husband rolls over, Kidman sneaks off to her private home office to achieve the real orgasm he warmed her up for but was otherwise unable to assist. Notably, she finishes herself off to BDSM pornography, making it clear at the start of the film that she already knows exactly what she wants in her sex life; she just doesn’t have the courage to voice it. This status quo is interrupted by the hiring of a young, tall, strapping intern played by Harris Dickinson, in whom Kidman immediately detects a Dominant Vibe. It’s immediately clear that the high-powered CEO and the bratty, fresh-out-of-college bro beneath her will be having a torrid office affair, but Kidman’s inability to voice exactly what she wants from him delays the consummation of their mutual lust. Babygirl is not the usual self-discovery kink story wherein a dormant submissive discovers a newfound sexual appetite, à la Secretary or Fifty Shades of Grey. It also goes out of its way to not pathologize Kidman’s interest in the kink-play power dynamic of simulating submissiveness when she’s truthfully a high-powered Business Bitch. It’s more of a kink coming-out story, wherein Kidman knows exactly wants but has to work up the courage to ask for it. Too bad she has to have dirty motel room sex with a confused, vulnerable employee to break out of her vanilla rut, since she’s already married to a hot Daddy type who directs stage plays for a living; the irony is that he’s extremely well suited for the job but remains an untapped resource.

All of this dramatic tension is released (and released and released) through a series of successfully thrilling sex scenes between Kidman & Dickinson, who establish a convincing sexual rapport as well-matched but poorly trained kinksters. Unfortunately, the impact of those scenes does not reverberate through Babygirl‘s attempts at corporate & familial drama elsewhere. When Kidman & Dickinson negotiate power dynamics in seedy nightclubs & motel rooms the vibes are electric; when attempting the same negotiations in empty offices & apartment hallways half of their lines feel coldly ADR’d, registering more as a ventriloquist act than a dramatic performance. I kept leaning towards the screen, straining to see if their mouths are actually moving. However, any time I found myself questioning the thematic choices to link Kidman’s kink journey to her religious-cult upbringing, her rebellious daughter’s queerness, her sympatico relation to a wild dog in need of training, to Girlboss cultural politics, or to the soundtrack’s absurdly on-the-nose needle drops, the movie would pause for another fantastic sex scene that felt alive, authentic, and rich with nonverbal power negotiations. It’s a wobbly balancing act that director Halina “Bodies Bodies Bodies” Reijn only gets away with because the actors she cast are extremely hot. Kidman & Dickinson’s undeniable hotness are just as important to the text of Babygirl as the alien impersonablility of Kidman’s AMC ad, the audience-teasing hints at her on-set orgasms, and the obscure, high-end cosmetic work that presumably goes into keeping her physically preserved and camera-ready. The movie works best when it vaguely gestures at these things—not when it makes declarative statements about sexual & corporate power—letting Kidman & Dickinson’s physical chemistry do the talking.

-Brandon Ledet