25 Movies About Kinky, Compulsive, Fetish & Taboo Sex [NSFW]

“The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover” (1989)
He’s fallen out of favor somewhat of late but there was a point when Peter Greenaway was the most exciting thing in British cinema, and that point reached something of a peak with “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover,” an unexpected arthouse hit. A gluttonous, theatrical satire on Thatcherite Britain, it sees Michael Gambon (the Thief) as a somewhat Pinteresque gangster with aspirations to be a restauranteur, to the frustration of his Cook (Richard Bohringer). Under his nose, his upper-class Wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) begins an affair with a rather timid bookshop owner, her Lover (Alan Howard), and the pair are fucking hungrily in the pantries and store cupboards at almost every chance they get, despite the terrible possible consequences (which duly follow). The film (presented on gorgeous operatic sets, in costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and lavishly scored by Michael Nyman) is almost impossibly indulgent, but that’s literally the point: it’s a film about indulgence, overflowing with food and flesh and bodily fluids, sex and nourishment and blood and death all tied up together in a pristine mess. By the time it reaches its famous conclusion—as Mirren feeds her deceased lover to her husband before shooting him in the head, you’re feeling a little bit queasy, but also a little bit hungry too… [B+]

“Shame” (2011)
Going from this NC-17 rated shocker to being an Oscar-winner for period drama “12 Years A Slave” has to be one of the more sudden career turnarounds of late, but Steve McQueen managed the leap in only two years. The masterful nature of ‘Slave’ now, in retrospect, serves to highlight some of the flaws in his second feature, but “Shame” still remains one of the more powerful looks at sexual compulsion that’s reached the screen so far. McQueen favorite Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a high-flying thirtysomething whose life of semi-anonymous sexual encounters, porn and masturbation is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of his equally troubled sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). McQueen’s austere, distanced style is a perfect match for the way that Brandon is unable to relate to most of humanity, using woman principally as sexual objects and keeping everything else at arm’s length: it’s a very neat match of form and content, so much of its power wrapped up in the way McQueen and DoP Sean Bobbitt capture their protagonist and his actions (for a film about sex, it’s almost shockingly unsexy). It missteps towards the end, becoming overly judgmental, and arguably even a touch homophobic (Brandon’s lowest ebb is communicated by him going into a hellish, red-tinged gay club and being fellated by a man). But that aside, it’s a powerful and vivid attempt to capture the pure compulsiveness of sexual addiction. [B]

“The Piano Teacher” (2001)
Perhaps the most abrasive and austere film in a career made up almost entirely of abrasive and austere pictures, “The Piano Teacher” sees Michael Haneke turn his attentions to sexual repression, perversions and fetishes: the result is, a decade or so on, not his finest film by some margin, but one that at least features an extraordinary and fearless central performance by Isabelle Huppert. The actress plays a piano professor from a troubled background with a long laundry list of sexual hang-ups and peccadilloes, who falls for a 17-year-old boy, eventually (after destroying the musical career of a younger rival) beginning a sado-masochistic relationship with him. It’s typically and unrelentingly punishing stuff, and it’s hard to deny that it packs a real punch in its most unsparing scenes (most notably in the scenes when Benoit Magimel’s student reluctantly fulfills her most humiliating fantasies. But when compared to, say, “The White Ribbon” or “Caché,” the psychology feels a bit obvious and pat, with the sense that Haneke is wagging his finger and shaking his head at the character rather than actually examining her. Still, Huppert saves the day: in a career full of performances of ferocity and courage, almost nothing matches up to this, and she brings a note of real humanity to a film that’s mostly lacking in it. [B-]

“Last Tango in Paris” (1972)
The last time we wrote about  Bernardo Bertolucci’s classic, which Pauline Kael famously (and incorrectly, as it turned out) claimed would start a revolution in sexually provocative filmmaking we mentioned actress Maria Schneider‘s subsequent assertion that she felt “raped” and manipulated during the shoot, especially during its most famous and borderline unwatchable “butter” scene. But just recently that story resurfaced to widespread outrage, showing how changing attitudes and social mores can alter the assessment of a film which of itself has not changed. In all honesty, there are those of us who have always been deeply discomfited by the movie — Schneider’s allegations are inarguably plausible given the raw exploitative ugliness of so much of the film’s portrayal of sex — but it remains a landmark, however problematic, and to excise it from a list like this would be its own kind of immoral. ‘Last Tango’ attempts to investigate how sex is used and abused by its characters, especially the middle-aged American widower played by a never-more-committed Marlon Brando, and its moments of vicious misogyny and graphic sado-masochism are both what makes the film so transgressively effective and what makes it such a difficult, quease-inducing watch. [B/B+]

“In The Realm Of The Senses” (1976)
American distributors tried to make it sound a bit more sensual, but Japanese enfant terrible Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 sex drama has an alternate, more appropriate title translation: “Bullfight of Love” — and even that doesn’t go nearly far enough in preparing you for this heady, eternally shocking film. A fictionalized account of a real event — a 1930s brothel servant’s obsessive affair with the madam’s husband—it leads to hubby’s penis being severed with a knife and that’s actually not the most disturbing part (though the pre-Lorena Bobbit stuff is certainly fucked up). A very primal look at carnal desire, and an examination of how it can curdle into psychosis, the film is pretty much constant sex, penetration, blow jobs, erotic asphyxiation, you name it. And it’s all “real,” which makes it doubly uncomfortable, funny, and yes, sometimes even erotic. Perhaps the strangest moment is the when the male lead played by Tatsuya Fuji places a hardboiled egg into the vagina of his partner (played by Eiko Matsuda), though, to be fair, she was feeding him mushrooms that were, shall we say, “lady flavored” just moments before. Not a film to see with your parents, or on a first, second, third or 50th date, “In the Realm of the Senses” is thoroughly twisted and not for the faint of heart. But while it’s amusing to poke fun at the movie as pornography-made-as-art (which in many ways it is), Oshima’s filmmaking mastery is fully on display too, delivering a terrifically odd and compelling film, once you get past how strange, obsessive, and even maniacal the jackrabbit sex can be. [B+]

When we inevitably revisit this list again in future, there are several films that will almost certainly be up for inclusion, the most recent being Paul Verhoeven‘s taboo-busting “Elle,” starring an Oscar-nominated Isabelle Huppert, and any one of various Gaspar Noe joints. “The Story of O” and “Caligula” are also notable omissions, though with the latter we felt that including “Salo” somewhat covered off our quota of “historical-gang-bang-movies-we-never-want-to-sit-through-again,” while “The Watcher in the Attic” is another one we’ve been meaning to catch up with. Famous Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s “Conspirators of Pleasure” is a terrifically oddball film, mostly live action, about masturbation fetishes and people building effigies of the objects of their obsession, while the leather-clad Daddy scene of William Friedkin’s notorious “Cruisin’” is pretty questionable nowadays, even if the film has gained a kind of cult reputation on its own merits since its release, in a famously curtailed, less explicit version. Von Trier’s “The Idiots” deserves a mention, not so much because it’s about sex as because its group sex scene featured an erect penis that was digitally pixellated for U.S. release back in 1998 which seems kind of adorable when compared with what we get in “Nymphomaniac” while, stuff like Ken Russell’s “Crimes of Passion,” “Body Heat,” “Basic Instinct” and half of Brian De Palma’s back catalogue fit more within the “erotic thriller” genre that we hope to cover off in a feature to itself one day soon.

Many others we rejected on the basis of simply being about straight-up, good ol’ sex, which, no matter how unsimulated or graphic-seeming, wasn’t what we were looking for here. All of this of course, was us trying to stay just this side of all-out fetish pornography which would not be our area of expertise, but if that’s what you’re looking for, we’ve heard there are one or two places on the internet that might cater for the more hardcore tastes. Make free use of the anonymity of the comments section to tell us your kinky, weird or all-out perverse favorites, no judgments, below.

— Jessica Kiang, with Oli Lyttelton, Rodrigo Perez, Ben Brock and Kimber Myers.