15 Alternatives to Grey: Other BDSM Movies for Your Valentine’s Day

By  · Published on February 11th, 2015

Universal Pictures

Fifty Shades of Grey looks to be the biggest movie Hollywood has made about BDSM since Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd leathered-up for Exit to Eden.

BDSM attire and culture have had a dense history of showing up peripherally in mainstream movies, but typically as a punchline (the aforementioned Garry Marshall classic), a perverse threat (Pulp Fiction), a storied practice of early ’90s femmes fatales (Body of Evidence), or – most compellingly – genre chic (Hellraiser, the Matrix series). Rarely do expensive, heavily promoted films address the subject front-and-center and, as a result, the complex and varied dynamics of power and pleasure involved in BDSM typically go underexplored within a generalized gimmick of “kink.”

Fifty Shades of Grey will, I have little doubt, prove instantaneously to be the most popular BDSM-related mainstream film ever made by numbers alone, despite not even being the first film of the year on the subject (that’d be the very much worth seeing Duke of Burgundy and R100). However, regardless of whether or not the film is any good, Fifty Shades will likely serve as a fleeing topical lightning rod, only discussed as a piece of cultural pulp or a source of sexual panic. It won’t, in short, inaugurate a wave of nuanced depictions of BDSM relationships that explore the practice’s serious potential for cinematic drama within its allegorical and actual dynamics of power and desire. So it’s a good thing that such movies already exist comfortably outside the margins of mainstream filmmaking.

Belle de Jour (1967)

In 1967, Luis Buñuel returned to filmmaking in France after decades abroad with one of the most controversial provocative opening scenes of the 1960s. A Parisian housewife (Catherine Deneuve) realizes that she wants to become a prostitute to pursue secret sexual adventures outside the household after having a dream in which she’s whipped against a tree. Decades after Un Chien andalou, Buñuel proved he could still challenge social and sexual conventions by exploring the most unspeakable desires.

The Night Porter (1974)

Liliana Cavani’s depiction of a sexual relationship between a former SS officer and a concentration camp survivor (Dirk Borgarge and Charlotte Rampling) that continues post-war stages an ambivalent and complex examination of the enduring ways that political domination during wartime resonates afterward. BDSM is a fitting platform for Cavani to explore her filmography’s repeated concerns. As explained by Gaetna Marrone, “Her characters deviate from social and political conformity; they oppose the rituals of power. They are driven to a kind of transgression that enables them to transcend the prisonlike limits of societal structures.”

Maîtresse (1975)

When the client (Gerard Depardieu) of a professional dominatrix (Bulle Ogier) becomes her off-hours lover, the structure she affixed between her home life and work life begins to blur, as do lines between fantasy, performance, and authentic, uninhibited pleasure. The ever-versatile Barbet Schroder uses the paradoxical sense of façade and immediacy inherent in filmmaking as a fitting platform for exploring similar distinctions in sexual performance.

Cruising (1980)

William Friedkin’s Al Pacino-starring thriller about an undercover cop’s infiltration of New York’s gay underground S&M scene was initially criticized for portraying homosexuality as a deviant social menace. But within this genre framework, and through its protagonist’s disintegrating understanding of who he believes he should be after work hours, is a surprisingly nuanced examination of the inherent malleability and fluidity of all human sexuality.

Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985)

Monika Treut’s Venus in Furs-inspired depiction of seething jealousy and desire in a S&M dungeon in Hamburg is a positively immersive experience into a subculture, led by an alluring yet elusive dominatrix Wanda (Mechthild Großmann). Udo Kier (a repeated face in narrative BDSM films) steals scenes as one of her subjects.

Nine ½ Weeks (1986)

No Hollywood filmmaker has staged sex scenes with a sense of elegance, intricacy, and visual sensibility quite like Adrian Lyne. And Nine ½ Weeks finds the filmmaker in top form. Mickey Rourke plays a Wall Street stock arbitrageur who pursues a heated romance with Kim Basinger’s art gallery worker with (surprise) a shared sense of entitlement, disregard, and intrigue, exercised through acts of sexual domination that range from openly manipulative to briefly empowering. Basinger’s character at one point gets a chance to hold the whip, but only after her male partner has given it to her.

Crash (1996)

David Cronenberg first explored S&M in James Woods and Deborah Harry’s violent sexplay in Videodrome, but his adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel explores more extensive overlaps between violence and sexuality through the (invented?) fetish of sexual arousal via car crashes. A satire of sexual connection in the late-Fordist, posthuman era, Crash renders vague the distinctions between humans and objects, flesh and commodity.

Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)

Kirby Dick’s empathetic, funny, and heartbreaking documentary about the eponymous BDSM performance artist explores Flanagan’s interest in BDSM practices as both a form of sexual play as well as a means of bodily self-empowerment and control while struggling with cystic fibrosis.

Romance (1999)

Where would a list like this be without Catherine Breillat? While the director has addressed BDSM themes across numerous works (see the difficult and brilliant Anatomy of Hell), this no-holds-barred view of a woman’s (Caroline Ducey) sexual journey with one dedicated partner and, eventually, subsequent partners fearlessly illustrates both the shared potential for passionate connections and lingering unsatisfaction with new boundaries that continually arise within her uninhibited sexual adventure.

Quills (2000)

A playfully liberal take on the life and history of sadism’s namesake, Philip Kaufman’s portrait of the Marquis de Sade’s (Geoffrey Rush) time at the Charenton insane asylum utilizes the notorious figure as a means to ruminate on evergreen topics of censorship and moral panics, and in the process makes an important case for the social necessity for subversive acts by diving into the possible life of the mind of one of history’s most controversial figures.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

Michael Haneke’s portrait of a terribly repressed pianist is organized around a terrific performance in the title role by Isabelle Huppert, whose minimalist expressions of dissatisfaction, aspiration, and longing become compoundingly affecting as she eventually risks revealing her deepest desires to a young paramour.

Secretary (2002)

The most-talked about BDSM film during the looming release of Fifty Shades of Grey, Steven Shainberg’s indie explores a continuum between the politics of a workplace hierarchy and the practice of sexual domination/subordination, with a breakthrough performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal at its center. As with Crash (and sex lies and videotape) Secretary proves James Spader to once have been the shining star of “deviant” protagonists in North American indie filmmaking

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

Mary Harron’s biopic of the infamous 1950s pin-up (portrayed by Gretchen Mol) is far from perfect, but it is a dedicated exploration of one celebrity’s battle against religious repression, a history of sexual abuse, and a stale midcentury patriarchy through a career in fetish photography. It’s worth note that the groundbreaking sex research of Alfred Kinsey (who enjoyed his own biopic a year before this) was published just a few years before Page’s rise to fame, and Masters and Johnson (now with their own TV series!) were researching contemporaneously. The ’50s weren’t such a square time after all.

Nymphomaniac, Part II (2013)

Easily the most difficult-to-watch entry on this list, Lars von Trier’s unflinching portrayal of Joe’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) lifelong arc of sexual encounter culminates early in its second entry with her introduction to K (Jamie Bell), a specialist in extreme masochism. Nymphomaniac is an often messy (and deflatingly didactic) throw-everything-to-the-wall exploration of exhaustive sexuality, but few episodes of this epic are as intricately realized as the moments between Joe and K who, despite their astoundingly violent dynamic, share perhaps the most understanding correspondence of any of her sexual partners.

Togetherness Season 1 Episode 2, “Handcuffs” (2015)

No, technically not a film, but this recent entry in the new Duplass brothers-produced HBO series features one of the funniest and most candid depictions of a couple whose sex life has gone out of step. Michelle (Melanie Lynskey) attempts to stage a surprise fantasy scenario as a dominatrix-lite, but Brett (Mark Duplass) can’t stop rupturing the fantasy by asking for a food break and incessantly requesting to know when they’ll have sex. The attempt at fantasy ends with Michelle accidently hurting Brett’s testicles, and the couple ends up in a familiar scenario on the couch, watching television.

Realizing fantasy is, indeed, no simple task.