Fitting for a genre so often misunderstood to be about male desire—rather than the female lusts and power actually at the center of so many of these films—that this list of erotic thrillers climaxes with two extraordinarily ambiguous and involute 21st century features by and about women. Jane Campion’s In the Cut plays less like a movie and more like an uncannily voyeuristic surveillance camera directly into a troubled woman’s mind, one that renders the world of erotic noir as a sensorial and sensuous acid bath. An NYC English teacher (Meg Ryan) learns of a sex murderer in her neighborhood, a series of killings that form a whirlpool through which she finds herself more and more attracted to the potentially dangerous homicide detective (Mark Ruffalo) tasked with solving the case. Abstract memories and synesthete sensations (the ellipses of rain on a windshield, the tangle of summer-hot sheets in bed, a voyeur’s stare, an illicit blowjob) pool together like clues in this traumnovelle about danger, about desire and about the lure of (and need for) both.
Upon its release in late 2024, Halina Reijn’s fantastic Babygirl was rightfully lauded for bringing complicated sensuality back to mainstream screens; however, some groused that the film did not fully commit to the erotic thriller stylings that were clearly part of its lineage. It’s all but impossible to imagine similar complaints about Reijn’s shocking directorial debut, Instinct, a movie that is both a precursor to Babygirl (A troubled woman’s desire and shame! Fraught power dynamics! Raves! Dogs!) as well as a far more extreme vision of dangerous eroticism. It’s a daring work that interrogates the sexual obsession between a criminal psychologist (Carice van Houten) and the incarcerated rapist (Marwan Kenzari) she seems determined to set loose within her life. A masterpiece of unpredictability, horror, dark humor and agonizing sexual discovery (which tracks, as Reijn worked under Paul Verhoeven on his 2006 Black Book, also starring van Houten), if the erotic thriller is to have a future, it will be with films as deviously daring and alluringly bold as Instinct—films meant to be watched in, and by, the dark.
