Films have long been one of the few places where BDSM shows up at all in mainstream life, and for a lot of people, they're where the curiosity starts.
The good news is that representation has genuinely improved. We're seeing more nuance, more female perspective, and more stories that treat power exchange as something emotionally complex rather than simply shocking.
Watching something together is also a low-pressure way to open a conversation with a partner. A "what did you think of that?" moment can often lead somewhere interesting.
The following films handle kink with craft, curiosity, or at minimum, something worth talking about.
The Secretary | 2002 | dir. Steven Shainberg
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a young woman who takes a job with a controlling attorney (James Spader) and discovers that his particular brand of discipline does something for her. The film is a D/s love story that is genuinely tender. It holds up better than most films of its era precisely because Lee is not a victim. This film gets the emotional logic of submission more right than almost anything made since.
Tokyo Decadence | 1992 | dir. Ryu Murakami
A Japanese call girl moves through a series of encounters with wealthy clients, including sessions that venture into S&M territory. Murakami adapted it from his own novel, and it sits somewhere between arthouse and exploitation: deliberately uncomfortable, occasionally brilliant. It is not an easy watch. The kink content is more about power and transaction than eroticism, which is the point.
Eyes Wide Shut | 1999 | dir. Stanley Kubrick
After his wife (Nicole Kidman) admits to a fantasy she never acted on, a New York doctor (Tom Cruise) spirals into a night-long encounter with the city's sexual underground, culminating in a masked ritual at a private estate. Kubrick's final film is about more about jealousy and the secrets couples keep from each other than it is about kink specifically. That said, the masked orgy sequence became one of the most discussed scenes in 1990s cinema. Babygirl cites this film as a direct influence, and both star Nicole Kidman, 25 years apart.
Babygirl | 2024 | dir. Halina Reijn
Director Halina Reijn has said explicitly that Babygirl is her answer to Eyes Wide Shut. In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice's fantasy sets William's entire journey in motion, but we never follow her. Reijn's question was: what if Alice had actually gone and lived it? Babygirl is that film.
Nicole Kidman plays a CEO who begins a submissive affair with her much younger intern, against the backdrop of her marriage and a public identity built entirely on control. The submission scenes are hot, but less interesting than what they reveal about her outside of them.
Love and Leashes | 2022 | dir. Park Hyun-jin
A Korean rom-com in which a woman discovers her co-worker's collar-and-leash delivery, and the two negotiate a D/s contract. What it does well is treat the submissive as the one setting the terms. It is lighter than most entries on this list.
The Duke of Burgundy | 2014 | dir. Peter Strickland
Two women (an entomologist and her assistant) have constructed an elaborate D/s ritual that shapes their daily life. What the film is actually about is the negotiation underneath the ritual: who wants what, who performs for whom, and what happens when desire isn't symmetrical. Visually stunning, entirely female-led, and the highest-rated film on this list. The hot take: it's the most honest depiction of the labour involved in maintaining a D/s dynamic that exists on screen.
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women | 2017 | dir. Angela Robinson
The true story of William Moulton Marston, the Harvard psychologist who created Wonder Woman, his wife Elizabeth, and their lover Olive Byrne. The bondage imagery threaded through the early Wonder Woman comics was not accidental: Marston believed that submission to loving authority was the key to a better world, and his personal life reflected this. The film is a kink origin story hiding inside a superhero theme.
Sanctuary | 2022 | dir. Zachary Wigon
A dominatrix (Margaret Qualley) and her long-term wealthy client (Christopher Abbott) spend one night in a hotel room negotiating the end of their professional relationship. Two actors, one room, 96 minutes of escalating psychological power reversal. The central question: in a professional dom/sub relationship, who actually holds the control? The performances are exceptional and the film takes the dynamic far more seriously than its premise suggests.
Dogs Don't Wear Pants | 2019 | dir. J-P Valkea
A Finnish film about a heart surgeon who, seven years after his wife drowns, discovers BDSM through a chance encounter with a dominatrix. What he finds there is proximity to the feeling of being close to death, which is the only place he can still sense his wife. It sounds grim - and it is - but it's a thoughtful treatments of one of the million reasons people seek out kink that exists on screen. Screened at Cannes, 90% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Are you curious about going from watching to doing? Our Good Ember Box is a good place to start.
