The erotic thriller â the sleaziest and at one point most enduring genres of the 1980s and â90s â seemed on the cusp of a comeback this year with the return of director Adrian Lyne. The master behind films like âFatal Attractionâ and â9 Âœ Weeksâ came back to screens (albeit small ones) with âDeep Water,â his first film in two decades since âUnfaithfulâ earned Diane Lane an Oscar nomination and one that firmly returns him to the erotic stomping grounds of his heyday.
Alas, the turgid drama, based on a Patricia Highsmith potboiler and starring a listless Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as open lovers who detest each other, is a turkey, a straight-to-streaming dud that evokes better ideas from better movies and fails to be neither erotic nor thrilling.
Still, âDeep Waterâ can serve as a twofold instruction point: for Hollywood to dig deeper to come up with hopefully better erotic thrillers and for viewers to revisit or, for the first time, discover the movies that precipitated âDeep Waterâsâ existence in the first place.
Meanwhile, Karina Longworth is taking filmgoers back in time to the âErotic â80sâ with the latest season of her âYou Must Remember Thisâ podcast, looking back on Hollywoodâs quintessential erotic thrillers, body horrors, neo-noirs, and sex comedies. The first part of the season debuts April 5, with the follow-up âErotic â90sâ set to debut this fall.
To get you started, IndieWire picks 19 of the best movies from Hollywoodâs golden age of erotic thrillers, kicking off with 1980âs âCruisingâ and ending with a few recent foreign titles that fit the bill.
Jude Dry and Samantha Bergeson contribute to this story.
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