BDSM films and documentaries
BDSM films and documentaries
The BDSM films below gather feature films, documentaries, and series in one place, with where to watch each one. BDSM on screen is usually either a joke or a crime. Rarely something people simply do. Even so, plenty gets it right: films about power and surrender, documentaries where the scene itself gets to speak, and films about paid company that go beyond the clichés.
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All BDSM films and documentaries in one place
Secretary
Lee leaves a clinic where she was treated for self-harm. She takes a typing job with lawyer E. Edward Grey. What grows between them is not therapy, and it never gets called that. Gyllenhaal plays submission as something that calms her rather than shrinks her. You rarely see that. The scenes stay small: a pen and a posture, nothing more is needed. For a lot of people this is where it clicked. Start here.
The Duke of Burgundy
Two women on an estate full of butterfly research. One plays the mistress, the other the maid, and the scripts are literally there on paper. Strickland films what happens when the submissive partner runs the direction and the dominant one grows tired of her own role. That is the most honest portrait of topping fatigue I know in a feature film. Slow. Stylized. There is no sex on screen, so anyone expecting the charge of nudity will be let down.
Maîtresse
Schroeder shot inside the real practice of a Parisian dominatrix, with real masochists on camera. Depardieu plays a burglar who falls for Ariane and gradually starts helping with her sessions. What is interesting is not the blows. It is what he has to do with them: jealousy of her clients, and the question of whether this is work or love. British censors held it back for years. Still the sharpest film about paid domination as a profession.
not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026
Sanctuary
A wealthy heir wants to end the arrangement with his dominatrix now that he is taking over his father’s company. She sees it differently. One hotel room. Two actors. Ninety minutes of negotiation, and nothing else. Abbott and Qualley play exactly what most films skip: the business deal underneath the scene, and what breaks when one person cancels it unilaterally. Sharply written. Uncomfortably funny too. The best recent film about this line of work.
Babygirl
Halina Reijn puts a New York executive opposite an intern who gives her orders without any fuss. Kidman plays the shame well. The sex is not the problem, the wanting is the problem. The negotiation goes clumsily, exactly like it does with people who never learned to talk about this. As a portrait of D/s it is messy and sometimes hard to believe. But as a portrait of a woman who is not allowed to have her own desire, a lot of it rings true.
The Piano Teacher
La Pianiste
Isabelle Huppert as a piano teacher who hands her student a letter that spells out exactly what she wants from him. He reads it and is disgusted. Haneke shows what happens when someone can only put her desires on paper and has no other language for them. This is not a film about BDSM going well. It is a film about the price of staying silent for years. Cold and precise. You do not watch it a second time.
Venus in Fur
La Vénus à la fourrure
A director is holding auditions for an adaptation of Sacher-Masoch’s novella. One actress arrives late. Within ten minutes she is running things. Polanski keeps it to two people on a bare stage and lets the roles flip until you no longer know who is directing whom. Seigner is magnificent. If you know the novella you will catch a clever joke, and if you do not you are watching a sharp chamber piece about who writes the script.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
no Dutch listing on JustWatch as of August 3, 2026
Belle de Jour
Séverine is married, well off and bored, and starts working afternoons in a brothel. Buñuel cuts her fantasies so dryly into the ordinary scenes that you do not always know what is really happening. Her masochistic daydreams are the point, not the brothel. Deneuve plays it with a face that gives nothing away. Exactly the intention. Almost sixty years old and still the best portrait of a woman who does not understand her own desire.
The Story of O
Histoire d'O
The film of Pauline Réage’s novel, and a good deal weaker than the book. Jaeckin shoots it like a perfume commercial: pretty light and silk robes, no interior life. What on paper is an unsettling study of total surrender turns into set dressing here. Only Udo Kier makes an impression. Watch it if you want to see how the seventies dressed up this material. Read the book if you want to know what it is actually about.
not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026
The Night Porter
Il portiere di notte
Vienna, 1957. A former camp guard recognizes, in a hotel, the woman he abused in the camp, and she seeks him out. Cavani called it a love story and rightly caught heat for it. What the film does do well is show how two people lock themselves into something no outsider can follow. What it is not is BDSM. No choice, no agreement.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
in the Netherlands only as an import disc, not digital, as of August 3, 2026
Bitter Moon
A paralyzed American tells an English tourist on a cruise ship, in lavish detail, about his relationship with Mimi. It starts playful and ends cruel. Polanski films the escalation without sparing anyone, and it is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, probably on purpose. The lesson is that it goes wrong the moment one person starts using the other to feel better. Hugh Grant has never been better cast.
not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026
Crash
After a car crash a married couple gets drawn into a group that gets aroused by collisions and scars. Cronenberg plays it completely flat. No panting, no judgment, as if you are watching an instruction manual. That is why it works. This is not a BDSM film, but it is the most precise film about fetish as such, about how a desire latches onto something no one else sees anything in. At Cannes it was booed and it won a prize.
In the Realm of the Senses
Ai no korīda
Based on the 1936 Sada Abe case. A maid and her employer withdraw into a room and never come back out. Ōshima filmed the sex explicitly and was prosecuted for it in Japan. What matters here is the reversal: she takes charge, he gladly gives it up, far past the point where anyone can still turn back. Not a film for someone just starting out. But one that stays with you.
The Handmaiden
Agassi
Park Chan-wook moves a Victorian con-artist novel to occupied Korea. A pickpocket becomes a maid to a wealthy heiress and is meant to help swindle her. The bondage is down in the uncle’s cellar. Exactly what it looks like: abuse of power by a man who cares more about his collection than about people. Set against that is what the two women build on their own. Beautifully made and far crueler than the trailer suggests.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant
A fashion designer, her silent assistant Marlene, and the young woman she falls for. One apartment, women only, and a relationship that tips over with every act. Fassbinder has Marlene serve throughout the whole play without saying a single word. That is the sharpest submissive role I know. Theatrical and now and then annoying. But on how dependence works, and how cruel a person turns the moment the roles flip, there is little better.
not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026
Cruising
Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover in the New York leather scene to find a serial killer. The shoot was sabotaged by gay activists who felt Friedkin framed the scene as a breeding ground for murder. They had a point. Even so, this is the only feature with footage of the real 1979 leather bars, shot with regulars as extras. Watch it as a document, not as a story, because the story leads nowhere.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
in the Netherlands only as an import disc, not digital, as of August 3, 2026
Preaching to the Perverted
A British young man is sent by a Christian lobbyist into a fetish club to gather evidence against its owner, an American dominatrix. He falls for the very thing he was supposed to report. Made in the wake of Operation Spanner, when British men really were convicted for consensual SM between them. As a film it is messy and dated. As a snapshot of a scene that had to defend itself in court, it is the only thing there is.
not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026
Quills
The last years of De Sade in the asylum at Charenton, where he keeps writing with whatever he can get his hands on. Geoffrey Rush plays him as a provocateur who cannot stop, not even when it costs him everything. Little of it is historically accurate and the film is too eager to be about censorship. But underneath lies something good: the doctor with his treatments turns out crueler than the writer he is supposed to cure.
not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026
A Dangerous Method
Jung treats Sabina Spielrein, starts an affair with her, and spanks her at her own request. She later becomes a psychoanalyst herself. Cronenberg films it as a tidy costume drama and that leaves it bloodless. The subject is worth it, because this is where the idea starts that pain and desire can belong together without anyone being sick. Knightley overacts. Watch it for what gets discussed, not for how it is shot.
Nymphomaniac: Vol. II
Von Trier splits Joe’s life across two volumes. The sadomasochism is in this second one. She seeks out a man named K who works through a strict protocol with no sex and no talking. Those scenes are strikingly accurate: the waiting room, the wait. And the fact that he is not nice about it. Around all that sits a lot of fuss and a heap of symbolism. Watch the first volume first, or skip it and accept that you are missing something.
Blue Velvet
A student finds a severed ear and ends up at the door of a singer held hostage by Frank Booth. Dennis Hopper plays a man who cannot tell violence and sex apart, and Lynch shows what that does to the person on the receiving end. The film often gets called sadomasochistic. It is not. There is no agreement, only force. It is the best film about the pull of watching something that is none of your business.
9½ Weeks
Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke in New York, for nine and a half weeks. Blindfolds, ice cubes, and that one scene at the open refrigerator that everyone knows. The rest is a long run of mood images set to music. What the film does well is show the breakdown, because this is not a relationship that goes anywhere. What it does wrong is never say so. For a whole generation this was the first brush with the subject.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
no Dutch listing on JustWatch as of August 3, 2026
Fifty Shades of Grey
The film of the book that made BDSM talkable at the kitchen table overnight and turned it into a caricature at the same time. Christian Grey is not a dominant. He is a man with a compulsion for control and a trauma served up as the explanation. The contract gets discussed endlessly and then mostly ignored. Dakota Johnson is better than the material deserves. Watch it to know what everyone was talking about, not to learn anything from it.
Eyes Wide Shut
Kubrick sends a doctor through New York for one night after his wife tells him about a fantasy. The masked ritual at the country house is the image that stuck, and it is not BDSM. No agreements, no negotiation, just a private club that uses people as scenery. What the film is actually about is jealousy, and the fright of hearing what your partner thinks. Slow and solemn. Better than its reputation.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
Pasolini moves De Sade to the final months of fascist Italy. Four men in power lock up eighteen young people and work through a program of humiliation. This film shows up on every list of SM titles and does not belong there. There is no consent and no reciprocity. It is a film about what power does when no one can say no. Heavy and clinical, hard to sit through. Important for exactly that reason.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
no Dutch listing on JustWatch as of August 3, 2026
American Gigolo
Julian Kaye drives a Mercedes through Los Angeles, dresses in Armani, and sleeps with rich women who pay him. Schrader films the work as a shop window. Surface, and nothing behind it. That is the point. Julian thinks he is at the controls, until a murder case shows how little of any of this is really his. About the work you learn nothing here. About a man who only exists once someone pays, everything.
Midnight Cowboy
Joe Buck gets on the bus to New York to have women pay for his company. It almost never works. What follows is hunger, an empty building with no heat, and a friendship with Ratso Rizzo that becomes the real subject. Honest about something you rarely see: male sex work with no shine, with clients who do not buy the fantasy. It won the Oscar for best picture while carrying an X rating. It still hurts.
Sunset Boulevard
A broke screenwriter moves in with a forgotten silent-film star and lets her keep him. Paid intimacy is never the word used for it. That is what it is: the suit and the apartment, all of it her money. Wilder shows how fast you come to despise yourself in that spot. And how badly she needs him, which is what really turns it grim. Of all the films about kept men, this is the most honest about the dependence running both ways.
My Own Private Idaho
Two young men hustle on the streets of Portland. Mike has narcolepsy and is looking for his mother. Scott is rich and plays street kid until his inheritance comes through. Van Sant keeps the clients brief and businesslike on screen, which is right. What it is really about is who still has someone once it is over. That scene by the campfire, where Mike says what he feels and gets nothing back, is the most painful moment on this whole list. River Phoenix plays him without a shred of self-pity.
Hung
A divorced gym teacher in Detroit is out of money and starts renting himself out to women. The show is strongest in the paperwork: scheduling dates, setting rates, clients who want more than sex, and a booker who guards his limits because he cannot do it himself. Season three stalls. The ending disappoints. Even so, this is the only long-form story in which male escort work is just work, hassle and all.
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
An aquarium cleaner stumbles into escort work by accident and gets only women who, according to the film, have something wrong with them. Too tall, too heavy, narcolepsy. That is the joke. The film is as cruel as that sounds, and the nice little layer at the end makes up for none of it. Still, here it is. For a lot of people this is still the image of a male escort, and knowing where that comes from helps.
Fading Gigolo
A florist with no money lets his old bookseller rent him out to women in New York. Turturro plays it calm and without any bragging. The scenes with an Orthodox Jewish widow are about touch after years without it, and that part rings exactly true. The rest is a fairy tale. No client is ever difficult, the money simply arrives and nobody feels awkward. Pleasant to watch. There is just no friction anywhere in it.
Spread
Ashton Kutcher plays a man in Los Angeles who lets himself be passed from one woman to the next. Her house, her car, her credit card. No rate, but a transaction all the same. The film knows this and shows how short the shelf life is once someone younger walks by. Thin as a character study, and the moral at the end is cheap. As an illustration of being kept without ever agreeing to anything, it works.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
no Dutch listing on JustWatch as of August 3, 2026
Diary of a Gigolo
Diario de un Gigoló
Argentine Netflix series about an escort who serves women from the upper crust and gets tangled up in the family of one of them. Melodrama, and that is how you should watch it. The sessions are shot neatly and the clients talk more than they touch. That is the nicest thing about it. Otherwise soap, with blackmail and revenge. Watch it for the mood, not for anything that resembles the real work.
Toy Boy
A stripper from Torremolinos gets out after seven years in prison and goes after the truth with his old colleagues. Spanish and hard, and completely unbelievable. The men sell company and sex to rich women, but the series would rather look at oiled bodies and conspiracies. If you want to see male sex work sold as pure fantasy, this is the clearest example. About limits or agreements you hear nothing.
The Wedding Date
A woman hires an escort to come with her to her sister’s wedding in London. That starting point is real. People book company for a social obligation more often than for sex. After that it turns into a romcom where he happens to be sensitive and rich and, of course, in love. The work has vanished from view after twenty minutes. Weak film, usable premise. Dermot Mulroney at least plays the part without a wink.
The Sessions
Mark O’Brien is paralyzed from the neck down by polio and hires a sex surrogate to lose his virginity. The film counts the sessions down, with limits agreed in advance and a set maximum number. Helen Hunt plays her without a trace of rescue. This is her profession, and she holds the line. Based on an essay O’Brien wrote himself. Rare and honest about what paid intimacy means to someone who has no other road.
The Girlfriend Experience
Soderbergh followed an escort in New York in the weeks around the credit crisis, with a porn actress in the lead. Money everywhere. Clients talk about their portfolios, she about rates and clothes. Intimacy barely comes into it, work all the more. Cool, jumping around in time and always at a distance. That seems to be the intention, but little of it sticks. More interesting as an experiment than as a film.
The Girlfriend Experience
Three seasons that stand apart from one another, about women who run escorting as a business. The first is the best: a law student builds files, screens clients and keeps her two lives separate until that falls apart. Discretion and risk are the subject here, not the backdrop. Coolly shot, emotionally sparse, which is not for everyone. Season three disappears into tech talk. If you want to see the business side, the first part is required.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
no Dutch listing on JustWatch as of August 3, 2026
Klute
Bree Daniels is a call girl in New York and gets tailed by a detective looking for a missing man. The thriller is the least interesting part. What stays with you are her sessions with the therapist, where she lays out exactly why she does this: in those hours she decides what happens and what gets sold. Jane Fonda won an Oscar for it. More than fifty years on, it is still the sharpest thing about control in this line of work.
Anora
A dancer from Brooklyn marries the son of a Russian oligarch, after he first hires her by the week. Baker films the work without judgment and without romance. A job with rates and colleagues, and with clients who are wrong about what they are buying. The second half is a long chase, comic and humiliating at once. The ending lasts two minutes and says more about paid intimacy than most of the films here.
Pretty Woman
Rich man hires a sex worker by the week, buys her clothes, falls in love. The fairy tale everyone points to the moment this subject comes up. The original script was bleak and got rebuilt into romance. You can feel it in everything that was cut out: the addiction and the hard ending. Charmingly played, granted. As a picture of the work it is nonsense, and that exact picture is still lodged in clients’ heads.
Working Girls
A day in a Manhattan brothel, filmed like office work. Changing towels, counting condoms, handling clients, and a shift set by the madam that runs on far too long. Borden spent years talking with women who did the work and you can feel it in every detail. No drama and no rescue. No punishment either. Of everything that exists about sex work, this comes closest to what an ordinary workday looks like.
not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
More than three hours of watching a widow in Brussels peel potatoes, make beds and, once a day, receive a man who pays. Akerman films that client for just as long and just as flatly as the dishes. That is the whole argument: this is housework. Slow is an understatement and you have to really want it. Anyone who sits it through understands afterward why this film was voted the best of all time in 2022.
not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026
Red Light
Flemish-Dutch series about three women. A sex worker who works in her boyfriend’s brothel, a police officer with a big case, and a soprano whose husband has disappeared. Through that disappearance their lives get tangled together. Carice van Houten plays the sex worker with no gloss and no pity, and that is the reason to watch. The crime plot is predictable. Still the best thing made about this world in Dutch.
Leaving Las Vegas
A screenwriter goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death and meets Sera, who works the streets. They make a pact: she will never ask him to stop drinking, he will never ask her to stop working. That pact is the heart of the film and it does not hold. Elisabeth Shue plays her with a dignity you rarely see in such roles. Heavy, and about drinking sometimes too romantic. About what two people offer each other, it is sharp.
Chloe
A doctor suspects her husband is cheating and hires a young escort to test him. What she is really buying are the stories afterward, and that arousal is the most interesting thing in the film. Then Egoyan lets it derail into a thriller with an ending that makes no sense. Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried hold it up for a long while. The first half is a good portrait of a client who does not know herself what she is ordering.
Sleeping Beauty
A student gets paid to lie sedated next to old men, who may do anything except penetration. She remembers nothing of it and has no say over what happens in those hours. That is exactly what is for sale. Leigh films it clinically, without a trace of eroticism. Many viewers call it empty and that charge is fair. As a thought experiment about consent and absence, it stays with you anyway.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
no Dutch listing on JustWatch as of August 3, 2026
Irma la Douce
Wilder made a comedy about a Parisian prostitute and the cop who becomes her pimp. He then invents a rich English client who is supposed to be her only one, and he cracks under it himself. Jealous of your own alter ego, played out as farce. Charming, far too long, and about the profession completely unrealistic. It is here because it shows how badly the client wants to see himself as the rescuer.
Hustlers
Strippers in New York drug bankers and drain their credit cards. Based on a true story, and the film is matter-of-fact about what set it off: after 2008 the clients stopped coming back and the rent still had to be paid. Jennifer Lopez is excellent. The best part is how honest the first half is about the emotional labor, the flattering and the remembering of names. After that it becomes a crime film and that sharpness fades.
Kink
Kink.com makes only heavy BDSM and sits in the old armory building in San Francisco. Voros was allowed to film everywhere, Franco paid. The scenes are not the point. What stays with you happens before and after: the list of what is allowed, and that one question halfway through about whether someone still wants to go on. Directors and models explain how they guard that. Messily edited and far too kind to the employer. As a lesson in negotiation, useful all the same.
Not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026. Import DVD or a festival screening.
Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
Bob Flanagan had cystic fibrosis. The doctors said he would not reach twenty; he made it to forty-two and built his whole life around pain, together with his dominant partner Sheree Rose. Kirby Dick keeps filming right into the hospital bed. Flanagan explains himself why pain he chooses is bearable and pain that happens to him is not. Masochism has never been explained more sharply. Heavy. And the best thing there is on this subject.
No Dutch stream. Found on DVD and in film archives.
Graphic Sexual Horror
Around 2000 Insex was the hardest bondage site on the net, set up by a former professor who called himself PD. Thirty-five thousand members paid sixty dollars a month. The models tell you themselves how the live broadcasts went and where it went wrong. Exhaustion, money, and a safeword that existed on paper but turned out to be worth less during a paid shoot. The makers never take sides. Uncomfortable, and honest for exactly that reason. This shows what is left of consent once money is involved.
No Dutch stream. Released on DVD and Blu-ray.
Fetishes
Broomfield is let inside Pandora’s Box, an expensive SM house in Manhattan where clients in 1996 paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour. Mistress Raven walks him through the dungeon and the treatment room. Eight chapters: slaves, mistresses, rubber, wrestling, corporal punishment, masochism, infantilism and politics. The clients who explain what they come for carry the film. Broomfield himself raises an eyebrow at everything and that gets tiring. As a snapshot of its time, still valuable.
Made for HBO. No Dutch stream, but released on DVD.
NO CAP: Gen Kink
Camille Vanuxem drops in on Kashira, a Flemish student society that runs safe-BDSM workshops, and then sets up a profile on FetLife. Four episodes of ten to twenty minutes. The fourth, about the darker side, is the best: it is about people who ignore limits and about what the scene itself does with that. The tone is young and the pace is fast. Even so, this is the only current Dutch-language material on kink that is free online.
Episode 1 on YouTube (VTM)Episode 4 on YouTube (VTM)
Flemish series, four episodes of ten to twenty minutes, complete on VTM's YouTube channel.
The Pleasure of Rope
For four years Bentley filmed behind the scenes at rope events in England and Japan. Kinbaku grew there from a corner of the BDSM scene into something whole couples take up. The people who do it tell you why themselves. Not every story is a pretty one; some are about what went wrong. Notably a lot of room for women who do the tying and for people who switch roles. Calmly shot. The conversations carry it, the editing does not.
Small production with no Dutch distribution. Shown at rope events and sold separately by the makers.
Folsom Forever
The Folsom Street Fair began in 1984 as a neighborhood protest against demolition plans and grew into the biggest fetish party in the world. Veterans of the leather scene tell how the AIDS years emptied out the district and why they threw the party anyway. Cléo Dubois is there, so is Gayle Rubin, and Jack Fritscher. You get the origin of codes that now show up everywhere. The sound is poor in almost every interview. Even so, these people tell their own history here, and that happens nowhere else.
No Dutch stream. Available to buy digitally through US stores.
Fifty Shades Uncovered
A cash-in, made to come out the same week as the theatrical film. Psychologists, a single mistress and a line of famous Brits talk about how a piece of fan fiction took over the world. Nobody gets past astonishment. The very thing the scene is angry about, namely what goes wrong in those books, stays undiscussed. A 4.0 on IMDb with three hundred votes. Deserved. It is here because you should know films like this exist.
How to Build a Sex Room
Interior designer Melanie Rose remodels a room for couples where they can play. In form it is just a home-makeover show, with velvet and a St. Andrew’s cross on the wall. The talk beforehand is what saves it. Rose sits down with both partners, tips a bag of toys onto the table to break the ice, and has them say out loud what they want to try and where it stops. For a lot of couples that is the first time. Comfort food with a usable core.
Ouwehoeren
The twin sisters Louise and Martine Fokkens worked the windows in the Red Light District from the sixties on. The makers followed them for a year and were allowed inside, during the work too. What stays with you is how ordinary it all is. Coffee, back pain, a fight with the family over money, a client who mostly wants to talk. About their gentle SM they speak as plainly as about the groceries. This kind of openness you get from almost no one.
Released internationally as Meet the Fokkens. Not on a Dutch streaming service, but on DVD.
Yab Yum
Yab Yum on the Singel was for years the most famous brothel in the Netherlands, until the club fell into criminal hands and had to close. More than ten years later, Van ‘t Hek tracked down the hard core. They recall what it was and in the same breath say what it cost. Extravagant and painful all mixed together. The film is more nostalgic than is good for it. Even so, you rarely hear so precisely how paid intimacy worked at the top of the market.
Seksengelen
Four sex workers who chose this profession themselves let the camera in on everything for three months. Emma is a mother of three and works as a high-class escort. Lolita offers the girlfriend experience and receives clients at home. Moira is a BDSM mistress. The episodes are about the work, the motivation and the taboo. Meradji lets them finish their thoughts and keeps her own opinion out of it. What Moira says about what clients look for with her is the sharpest part. PowNed is rarely subtle; this is neatly made.
Candy Boys
Four men who make their money off women’s desire. Strippers Angelo and Denzel, erotic masseur Damon, escort Timo. The series starts from the assumption that this is a dream job with piles of money and then lets that assumption deflate. The market is small, the rules pinch, and the taboo sits mostly with the clients. For a Dutch viewer this is the most honest picture of male sex work here. Short, and the questions sometimes stay on the surface.
Episode 1 on YouTube (NPO 3)Episode 2 on YouTube (NPO 3)
Web series of four episodes, complete on NPO 3's YouTube channel.
Help! Een hoer in de klas
Josje works in the Red Light District and gives guest lessons. She stands in front of first-years at the University of Humanistic Studies, in front of trainee social workers, and in front of a fourth-year high school class. Those students ask exactly what adults do not dare to ask. They get answers. Josje also talks about loverboys and about the difference between choosing and being forced. The film is from 2012 and the assumptions in the classroom have barely shifted since. Short, clear, still useful.
Meiden van de Keileweg, 25 jaar later
In 1999 Roy Dames filmed the women in Rotterdam’s street-prostitution zone on the Keileweg. A quarter of a century later he tracks them down. Wendy is clean, a mother of three, and now helps others. Lieke is stuck again in a bad relationship. Christel is terminally ill. Sonja left the work behind and is now a BDSM mistress. Dames never judges and that makes the series hard to watch. What stays with you is how little separated those four lives.
De Grens van OnlyFans
Host Dzifa Kusenuh opens her own OnlyFans account under the name Dzifantasy and visits creators who make their living from it. The first episodes are about taking photos and setting prices. The last is about what happens when subscribers keep asking for more and the line moves a little further each time. Seeing her go through that live is stronger than any interview. At the end she has to decide whether the account stays.
Episode 1 on YouTube (NPO 3)Episode 4 on YouTube (NPO 3)
Web series of four episodes, complete on NPO 3's YouTube channel.
Hot Girls Wanted
American girls barely eighteen answer an ad, fly to Miami and move in with an agent who arranges their bookings. The film follows them for a few months, exactly as long as their shelf life in that circuit lasts. The most painful part is not what happens on set but the arithmetic afterward. The makers do push hard toward a single conclusion and barely give a voice to women who see it differently. Watch it with that slant in the back of your mind.
Whores' Glory
Three places, three worlds. A lit-up glass bar in Bangkok, a boarded-up alley in Faridpur, a border town in Mexico. Glawogger uses no voice-over and lets the women speak for themselves about money, clients and God. The images are strikingly beautiful, and people have rightly argued over that choice. The last part goes further in what it shows than it needed to. Even so, little exists that shows so well how circumstances decide what sex work is.
Not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog as of August 3, 2026. On DVD, and sometimes at a festival.
Scarlet Road
Australian sex worker Rachel Wotton focuses on clients with a disability. You see her with John, who has had MS for twenty-six years, and with Mark, who has cerebral palsy. It is about lifting, timing, talking, taking the time. All of it simply comes on screen. Wotton is also studying the subject and, through her organization Touching Base, works on the access that people with a disability have here. You rarely see so precisely what paid intimacy involves in practice.
IMDbOfficial site with video on demand
No Dutch stream. Available to rent through the film's own site.
Sexual Healing
Evelien is fifty-three, has had cerebral palsy since birth and uses a wheelchair. Her few sexual experiences were disappointing and she is convinced no one is waiting for her. Conversations with her support worker Brigitte bring the desire back anyway. Fraanje films the whole road, from buying lingerie to the contact with sex worker Thomas. The doubt is not wiped away. This is the best Dutch film about what paid intimacy can mean to someone. Start here if you pick one.
Huidhonger
Twenty-one minutes about people who have not been touched in a very long time. Röben films literally close to the skin, with massage footage as the through line. It started with a masseuse who told her she spent more time on the talking afterward than on the massage itself. That says enough. No experts to explain it, only people telling you what they miss. Made small and very precise. It runs shorter than an episode of anything and stays with you far longer.
Tent en seks
Sunny Bergman sets up a tent, invites passersby in and grills them thoroughly. Four episodes: male insecurity, orientation and gender, how sexuality takes shape, and how you keep it exciting. The setup sounds like a joke and works for exactly that reason. In that tent people say things they would never say at a table with a camera. The episode about men who think they always have to want it is the most useful.
Sunny Side of Sex
Bergman travels to Uganda, China, Cuba and India with one question: is the Netherlands really as liberated as it likes to think. The answer disappoints. In Uganda she gets a sex lesson from Ssenga Brenda, and that conversation lays bare more about Dutch shame than about Uganda. Among the Mosuo in the Himalayas, lovers share only the bed and nothing else. Bergman keeps putting herself on screen, which now and then becomes too much. Otherwise the series holds up fine after fifteen years.
The Principles of Pleasure
Three episodes about female pleasure and about how little science wanted to know about it for so long. Sexologists and researchers show what the clitoris really looks like and why the orgasm gap exists. The episode about the mind explains that arousal and desire are not the same thing. Emily Nagoski and Ericka Hart drop by. The form is Netflix-cheerful with a lot of animation, and that hides the fact that the content simply holds up. The shortest route to how desire works.
Sex, Explained
Five episodes of twenty minutes, narrated by Janelle Monáe. The first is about sexual fantasies and is the only one you really need here. Researchers explain how often people fantasize about things they would never want in real life, and why that is completely normal. After that it shifts to attraction, contraception, fertility and childbirth, and the relevance drops away fast. Fast pace, little depth. Handy as a first introduction, not when you are already further along.
Samen Vreemdgaan?
Three couples who have agreed with each other that they may sleep with others. Two middle-aged beginners. An experienced duo who throw parties themselves, and a couple heading off on a swingers holiday for the first time. Bleekemolen mostly films what is said beforehand and afterward, and that is the right choice: the negotiation is the subject here, not the sex. Without the snicker this usually gets in the Netherlands. Start here.
A 3Doc by BNNVARA, aired on NPO 3 in September 2024.
Polyamorie
Dutch documentary about people who have several love relationships at once. Isabeau and Felix are getting married and both have someone on the side. A married couple with two kids opened up their relationship. A third woman has her husband here and a lover in Denmark. In between, experts come in to explain the psychology of it, which makes the whole thing a bit tame. Its strength is that it is about the practicalities: calendars, jealousy, a mortgage with three names on it. Fifty minutes, no sensationalism.
Full title: Polyamorie – als liefde niet op kan. Only available with a Videoland subscription.
Wanderlust
Joy is a therapist, her marriage has stalled, and after two flings she suggests they both be allowed to sleep with others. Toni Collette plays her without shame. The series does something almost no film about this does: it shows the conversation itself. The rules. The evening when it does not work after all. In episode five Payne explains it away through grief and guilt, and that is where it retreats. The four episodes before that are the best fiction about an open marriage there is.
You Me Her
A married couple from Portland each separately book the same escort and then keep her in their lives. For five seasons everything revolves around three people trying to work it out together. It is a sitcom. Every conflict is resolved within twenty minutes and the neighbors are caricatures. But polyamory is treated here as a relationship form and not as a joke or a phase, and in 2016 that was rare. Watch it for the premise, not for the jokes.
Available in the Netherlands on Amazon Prime Video.
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
The creator of Wonder Woman lived for years with his wife and with a student, and all that rope in his comics came from somewhere. Robinson films it as a love story in three directions and not as a scandal. The best part is how the three make their agreements and keep adjusting them. The weakest is the framing device with the decency committee. Heavily polished up historically, and the heirs said as much at the time. As a portrait of a working triad, it rings true.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Two couples from Los Angeles come back from a weekend of self-actualization and decide that total honesty solves everything. They talk about it endlessly. And then, at the moment it should really happen, the film loses its nerve. That ending is exactly the reason to watch it, because that is where most people get stuck too. Sharply written. About the difference between talking about it and doing it, still spot on.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Two American friends, a Spanish painter and his ex-wife. For a while the triangle simply works, and Allen films those weeks without judgment. Then he lets it collapse because one of the three turns out to be unstable, and that is the easy way out: it is not the arrangement that fails, it is the unhinged woman who fails. Cruz won an Oscar for it and deserves it. Beautiful, light, and in the end a coward about the question the film raises itself.
Easy
Standalone half-hour episodes about couples in Chicago. One of the storylines follows a man and a woman who open up their relationship, and you watch it fall apart and get patched back together over three seasons. Swanberg has the actors improvise a lot, so the conversations sound eavesdropped on and there is barely any plot. The quality swings hard. The good episodes show where such agreements break down in practice, and it is almost always something small.
Sex/Life
A married woman in the suburbs keeps a diary about the sex with her ex. The starting point is sound: someone who admits she is missing something and does not want to quietly die of it. The execution is soap. Bedroom lighting, dialogue that sounds like a pitch, and a second season that ends up treating her desire as a problem to be solved. Watch it if you are curious how this goes wrong. Otherwise not.
Gypsy
A psychologist in New York enters the lives of her clients under a false name. Naomi Watts plays someone who can only feel her own desire when she is playing someone else. On boundary-crossing by a therapist the series is painfully precise, and on role-play as an escape route too. Slow. After ten episodes Netflix pulled the plug, so an ending never comes. It stays the sharpest fiction about what happens when you would rather act out a fantasy than name it.
Elle
Michèle is raped in her own home, does not report it and then goes looking for her attacker herself. Huppert plays her without a single moment of asking for pity. Verhoeven refuses to explain what she wants, and that is exactly why the film stays uncomfortable instead of explainable. Anyone looking here for a lesson about boundaries will be let down. This is also not a script to take anything from. It is about a woman who answers to no one for her own reaction.
Deep Water
A man lets his wife take lovers and watches. That is cuckolding, and for a moment the film seems to be about that: about arousal from humiliation, and about an agreement two people made together. Then those lovers start to disappear and the kink becomes the explanation for murder. Lyne can build tension. Affleck plays it flat. As a portrait of something a lot of couples actually do at home, this is a missed opportunity of the first order.
Fair Play
Two analysts at a hedge fund keep their relationship secret, until she gets the promotion he had already counted on. What happens next is about power in bed and about a man who cannot stand that the balance has flipped. Domont films the humiliation up close and holds it longer than is comfortable. The last half hour overshoots. The question underneath stays a good one: what does it do to desire when the roles reverse?
Poor Things
Bella discovers sex without the shame everyone around her was taught. She works for a while in a brothel in Paris and treats it as work and as research at the same time. Stone plays it physically and without irony. It stays a fable, so you can draw nothing from it about real sex work. What does stay with you: how strange people find it that someone is curious and simply says so out loud. Beautifully made, now and then self-satisfied.
Nymphomaniac: Vol. I
Joe recounts her sexual life to the older man who picked her up off the street, chapter by chapter. The first part is the light one: the train, the bet, the keeping of names. Von Trier keeps having the listener throw fly-fishing comparisons at it, which is both the joke and the weakness. Anyone who knows only the second part misses where that tone comes from. More cool than arousing, as a description of someone taking inventory of her own desire. Watch them as one film.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
The second part appears earlier in this list.
Shame
Brandon in New York has sex the way other people drink. McQueen films it bare and without a single arousing image, and that is the point: there is no desire in it, only repetition. Fassbender plays someone who can take nothing from another person. When his sister comes to stay, it becomes visible where the emptiness comes from, though the film thankfully never fully explains it. Useful because you see the difference between wanting a lot of sex and no longer feeling anything.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
A retired teacher books a young sex worker in a hotel room because in her whole marriage she never once had an orgasm. Four appointments, one room, and mostly talking. Emma Thompson plays the shame and the nosiness and the longing all at once. Daryl McCormack plays the work the way it really goes: giving attention, keeping the pace, drawing lines and not telling everything about himself. No rescue, no romance. This comes closest to what paid intimacy can mean to someone.
Hope Springs
After thirty-one years of marriage Kay drags her husband to a week of intensive couples therapy. They have slept apart for years and he does not see the problem. The exercises they get are real and painful to watch: touching each other with no goal, saying out loud what you want. Streep and Jones play it small. On the outside this is a friendly cinema comedy with music that softens every scene. Underneath sits the best thing Hollywood has made about sex after sixty.
Enough Said
Two divorced people in their fifties start something, and she lets it fall apart by listening to what his ex says about him. Holofcener writes conversations that sound like you are eavesdropping on them in a restaurant. The film is about the fear of a second mistake, and about how it has you gathering evidence on the very first evening. Gandolfini is disarming in his last leading role. About dating after a divorce, this is the most honest there is.
Gloria Bell
Gloria is divorced, well into her fifties, and goes out dancing on her own in clubs where people her age come. She meets a man who just came out of a marriage and is still fully tied to his daughters. Lelio films her without making her pitiful and without celebrating her. The sex is simply on screen, on a body of nearly sixty, and nothing is built up around it. Julianne Moore carries the whole film. A touch tamer than the original.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
Lelio's own English-language remake of his Chilean Gloria from 2013.
45 Years
A week before their forty-fifth anniversary party comes the news that the body of Geoff’s old girlfriend has been found in a glacier. Kate watches her husband slowly walk back toward someone else. Haigh films long silences in an English house and holds the camera on Charlotte Rampling. There is sex once. It is the heaviest scene in the film. About what you never asked in forty years and what that silence finally costs.
Hasta la vista
Three Flemish men in their twenties are still virgins and do not want to stay that way. Jozef can barely see, Philip can move only his head and one hand, and Lars is in a wheelchair from a brain tumor. Under the guise of a wine trip they drive to a Spanish brothel set up for men with a disability. Enthoven plays it as a comedy and that works: they do not become sad cases but friends who get on each other’s nerves. Based on the story of activist Asta Philpot.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
Flemish film, released internationally as Come As You Are. Currently not legally streamable anywhere in the Netherlands.
Touch Me Not
Pintilie mixes real people and actors together in a study of touch. Laura cannot enjoy sex, hires a sex worker and gets no further than watching. Christian has spinal muscular atrophy and the richest sex life of anyone on screen. Along the way a workshop and a kink club go by. The discomfort is constant. The form is cold and mannered, a lot of people bail out, and you can see that in the score. Anyone who sits it through gets scenes that exist nowhere else.
Won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2018. Documentary and fiction deliberately blend together.
Rust and Bone
De rouille et d'os
An orca trainer loses her lower legs and starts something with a man who takes her to bed without any fuss and otherwise wants little to do with her. At first that is exactly what she needs. Later exactly not enough. Cotillard plays it without a single brave moment. Audiard films bodies as bodies, the damaged ones too, and is never apologetic about it. The second half gets bogged down in too much plot. For the sex scenes it stays worth it.
Margarita with a Straw
Laila has cerebral palsy, moves from Delhi to study in New York and discovers there that she is attracted to both women and men. Bose lets her desire, masturbate, cheat and hurt someone, so she is a person and not an instructive example. That is rare in a film about a disability. The ending explains too much. Bose actually wanted to cast an actress with cerebral palsy and in the end chose Kalki Koechlin.
Indian film in Hindi and English. Currently not legally streamable anywhere in the Netherlands.
Basic Instinct
Verhoeven made the film that defined the genre and in the same move did the damage that is still baked into it. The killer ties her lovers down with a white scarf. Bondage here is proof of derangement, not of a preference. Thirty years later that is still the reference people reach back to, usually without having seen the film. Sharon Stone plays Catherine better than the script deserves. As a thriller it works fine.
Fatal Attraction
A married man has a weekend with a woman and afterward she refuses to disappear. The first half is sharp about how casually he sets it up and how little he wants to do with it afterward. Then it turns. Alex becomes a monster and her desire a disease. Glenn Close fought that ending for years and she was right. What is left is a film that taught generations that a woman who wants something is dangerous.
Body Heat
Kasdan transplanted a film noir to Florida and lets the heat do the work. A mediocre lawyer, a woman who knows exactly what she is doing, and a plan he is too slow for. The sex is strikingly direct for 1981 and serves the plot instead of the other way around. Kathleen Turner, in her very first film role, is already better than William Hurt ever gets. Beyond that the film promises nothing. That is enough.
Dressed to Kill
De Palma shoots beautifully and thinks clumsily. The chase through the museum and the elevator scene are still real craftsmanship. Then comes the reveal, and it casts a trans woman as a killer with a second personality. People were protesting that outside the theater back in 1980, and it hasn’t aged any better. Watch it for the camera and for Angie Dickinson. The psychiatry in it is invented to make the twist hold up.
Last Tango in Paris
Ultimo tango a Parigi
Two people meet in an empty apartment and leave their names at the door. As an idea, that is one of the most honest things this genre has produced. The film became notorious for a scene Maria Schneider only heard about on set. Bertolucci later admitted he wanted her real reaction. Brando knew. She was nineteen. That is not an anecdote, it is a line crossed on camera, and it makes the rest impossible to watch with an open mind.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
Not available on any Dutch service right now; the JustWatch page will flag it the moment that changes.
Unfaithful
Lyne shoots infidelity up close. The train ride home. The look in the mirror, and the moment she realizes she is going to do it again. Diane Lane plays that without ever once explaining why. The best hour Lyne has ever made. Then the plot arrives and adultery turns into a crime with a punishment after all. Watch it for that first half and accept that the second is the tidy ending 2002 apparently needed.
Bound
Two women, a suitcase of mob money and a plan that is tight as a drum. The Wachowskis brought in Susie Bright to build the sex scenes, years before intimacy coordinators existed. You notice it right away: the sex is written from what those two have with each other, not from who is watching. Gershon and Tilly play it like they both get the joke. Rare in this genre. Here desire is not punished with a corpse.
Disclosure
A woman with power forces a man into sex and the film is not sure what to do with that. One half takes him seriously. The other half is a 1994 techno-thriller with virtual reality in it. Demi Moore gets a function, not a character. Still, there is something usable here: coercion does not stop existing the moment a woman does it, and a man who says no owes no one an explanation. The film just does not dare hold on to that point.
Indecent Proposal
A millionaire offers a million dollars for one night with another man’s wife and she says yes. The script asks exactly the right question: who is actually deciding here, and what does his jealousy do to a deal she made herself. Then the film goes for sentiment and the marriage becomes the problem. Redford is charming. Moore and Harrelson stay flat. The idea is better than the execution, and you can tell within half an hour.
Swimming Pool
An English novelist borrows her publisher’s house in the South of France and his daughter shows up there. Ozon keeps you guessing for a long time whether he is making a thriller or a portrait of someone jealous of another woman’s body. Charlotte Rampling plays that envy without ever asking for sympathy. The ending is a trick. Shame. What stays with you is the summer boredom where desire starts to simmer.
Gone Girl
Fincher shoots a marriage like a criminal investigation and it turns out to be accurate. Rosamund Pike plays a woman who knows exactly what role is expected of her and then uses that role as a weapon. The film is about the stories couples tell about each other and about how little of it has to be true. No kink. But the sharpest film on this list about power between two people who love each other. Almost two and a half hours and not a minute too long.
The Voyeurs
A couple watches the neighbors across the way and keeps getting drawn in deeper together. The first half understands what voyeurism is about. That it turns you on to see what was never meant for you, and that watching together does something to what you do in bed afterward. Sydney Sweeney carries the film. Then a double twist lands on top of it that wants to be smarter than the material. As a guilty pleasure it works. As a film about watching, it drops out halfway through.
Stranger by the Lake
L'inconnu du lac
A cruising spot by a lake, shot with a fixed camera and without a single note of music. Franck watches someone drown at the hands of the man he is in love with, and keeps coming back. Guiraudie does not judge and explains nothing. He shows that knowing someone is dangerous can heighten the attraction instead of killing it. The sex is explicit and filmed in a completely matter-of-fact way. Uncomfortable and precise. More honest about desire than the entire American half of this list.
Cruel Intentions
Les liaisons dangereuses moved to rich teenagers in Manhattan, and it works better than it should. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays manipulation like a sport she has mastered. The bet is about a girl who does not know she is the stake, and the film is not naive about that. What it never develops is the power the two leads hold over each other. A time capsule from 1999 that has held up surprisingly well.
365 Days
365 dni
A mob boss kidnaps a woman, holds her for a year, and the film sells that as romance. That is not an interpretation, that is the plot. He literally says he will not touch her without consent and then ignores it. No agreement, no safeword. No way out. What is called dominance here is a hostage situation in a good suit. Netflix filled its most-watched list with it for three years running. That 3.3 on IMDb is earned.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
There are two sequels, 365 Days: This Day and The Next 365 Days, both on Netflix.
Fifty Shades Darker
Part two mostly drops the kink and becomes a thriller with a stalking ex and a helicopter crash in it. What is left of the relationship is a man who reads her phone and arranges her job, presented as caring. The contract from part one never comes back. Dakota Johnson again does more than the script asks of her. Anyone who hoped the series would explain something about negotiation walks away disappointed for good.
Fifty Shades Freed
The final part is a marriage film with a kidnapping in it. The agreements from the first book are long forgotten by then. He decides where she works and what her name is, and whether she has children he settles too. The film calls that a happy ending. One scene in the playroom brings back a little of the earlier tension. The rest is product placement with a soundtrack. Three films long it promised there was a contract and no one ever stuck to it.
After
It started as fan fiction about Harry Styles and you can tell. A freshman falls for the boy everyone calls unsuitable, and the film thinks aloofness is the same thing as depth. The stakes from the book, a bet about her, are flattened in the adaptation until there is barely anything on the line. Four installments by now. Relevant because millions of readers came into dark romance through this, not because the film itself can do anything.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
Three sequels followed; After We Collided is also on JustWatch NL.
Obsessed
A temp gets fixated on her married boss, and the film follows the Fatal Attraction playbook exactly, twenty-two years later and without the sharp first half. Beyoncé gets little to do until the fight in the attic. Ali Larter plays the obsession without anyone giving her a reason for it. Flat and predictable. It ends the way these films always end. It is here because the genre exists, not because it does anything for you.
The Boy Next Door
A teacher sleeps with the boy next door once and afterward he wants her whole life. Jennifer Lopez plays the regret more convincingly than the film deserves. The rest is stalking, sold first as romance and then finished off as horror after all. Then there is the gift: a first edition of the Iliad, a blunder no one on set stopped. Watch it with friends around. Or do not.
You
A bookseller explains in voice-over why stalking is love, and for three episodes the show makes you like that voice. That is the trick and it works. Penn Badgley plays Joe so believably that he kept having to warn people about him in interviews. From season three on it turns into more of a soap about who is down in the basement this time. The first two seasons are the sharpest thing anyone has made about this fantasy.
Killing Eve
A British intelligence officer and a contract killer become obsessed with each other, and the show dares to let that obsession run both ways. Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh play attraction without much needing to happen. Waller-Bridge wrote the first season and you can hear it in the dialogue. After that the lead writer changes every season and it sinks into one long chase. Season one is excellent. Nobody needed the ending.
Normal People
Two people from a small Irish town keep finding their way back to each other and keep almost talking about it. The sex scenes were made with an intimacy coordinator and it shows. Things get asked, things get answered, and it stays arousing all the same. Marianne later asks a boyfriend to hurt her, and the show ties that to how little she thinks she is worth. One explanation out of many. Beyond that this is the best thing anyone has made about young desire.
Berlin Syndrome
An Australian backpacker goes home with a charming teacher and the next morning the door is locked. Shortland films captivity without ever once making it erotic, and that is why it belongs here. The same setup that sells dark romance as fantasy gets played out here into what it would actually be: boredom, humiliation, and years at a window that does not open. Teresa Palmer carries it. Heavy and slow. But it rings true.
Phantom Thread
A couturier who controls everything in his house takes in a woman who will not fall in line with it. What grows out of that is a power dynamic the two of them invent together and both come to agree on, even though not a word of it is written down anywhere. Anyone who has read the average dark romance sees here what it actually looks like. He asks for it, she delivers it. No one pretends it is not an arrangement. Day-Lewis and Krieps are both excellent.
Tea Consent
Almost three minutes of animation. Consent explained through a cup of tea: you offer, someone says yes or no, and anyone unconscious drinks nothing. So simple it almost gets insulting. That is exactly why it works. Schools and police forces around the world still play it eleven years later. The same channel has a version without swearing. Free, and you are done before your own tea has steeped.
Full version on YouTube (Blue Seat Studios)Version without swearing
Text by Emmeline May, animation by Rachel Brian. Two minutes and fifty-one seconds, free on the official channel.
Nachtdieren: shibari
Shibari: pijn verlichten met touwen
Raven van Dorst sits in on a session where rope is used against pain. Not as play, not as a pretty picture. Something physical that brings a nervous system down, and you rarely see that angle. Six minutes gets you nowhere, so it stays a first impression. For anyone who has never seen someone lying in rope, that is enough to grasp why people do this. Shorter than your coffee break and it is online for free.
Full version on YouTube (NPO Start)
Episode from the Nachtdieren series on NPO 3. Six minutes and twenty-six seconds, free on the NPO Start YouTube channel.
Leven met een fetisj
Djanlissa Pringels visits Dutch people with a fetish and lets them explain it themselves. Iris on what latex does for her confidence, Jeffrey on dressing up as a restroom attendant. Dennis and Max do puppy play. Curious in tone, without any snickering, and on this subject that is rarer than it should be. Episodes of eight to twelve minutes, free online. It never goes deep. What you do see is people talking out loud about something they usually keep quiet about.
Latex gives Iris power and confidence (YouTube)Dennis and his handler Max on puppy play (YouTube)Jeffrey and his restroom-attendant fetish (YouTube)
Standalone episodes of eight to twelve minutes, free on the VICE Nederland YouTube channel.
Gespielte Vergewaltigung: Geht dieser BDSM-Fetisch zu weit?
Eighteen minutes on the most uncomfortable corner of kink: people who act out a rape because they want it themselves. The episode is barely about the scene. It is about everything around it, and that is what it should be about. Agreements up front, safewords, and what you do when someone shuts down anyway. In German, free. This subject is rarely handled this calmly, and certainly not by a public broadcaster.
Full version on YouTube (Die Frage)
In German, eighteen minutes, free on the Die Frage channel from the public youth network funk.
Inside Findom Szene
Inside Findom Szene: Kann man als Geldherrin reich werden?
Findom is the branch of femdom where money is the game. Someone pays just to have paid. The power is in the transfer itself. Y-Kollektiv follows women who make a living from it and holds the promise of easy money up to the light, which turns out sobering for anyone who thought this was a quick side gig. Twenty-five minutes, in German and free. There is no better material on paid dominance online.
Full version on YouTube (Y-Kollektiv)
In German, twenty-five minutes, free on the Y-Kollektiv YouTube channel (Radio Bremen).
Sex Stuff: Japanese Rope Bondage with Midori
Sex educator Zoë Ligon lets Midori tie her up, someone who has been teaching rope for decades. You see the conversation up front, the knots themselves and the face of someone going through it instead of talking about it. Midori does not play along with the mystique that kinbaku usually gets wrapped in and simply explains what she is doing. Thirteen minutes, free. This is how rope starts in practice, long before it becomes a photo shoot.
Full version on YouTube (Zoë Ligon)
In English, thirteen minutes, free on Zoë Ligon's channel.
Scorpio Rising
Twenty-eight minutes of bikers polishing their leather, set to pop singles from 1963. No dialogue. Anger films a buckle, a zipper, a boot and a chain as if they were bodies, and that is roughly the definition of a fetish: a thing that takes the place of a body. Nazi imagery runs through it, and so do images of Jesus. In Los Angeles the film was seized and prosecuted for obscenity. Without it, the leather scene would have looked different on screen.
As of August 3, 2026, not available in the Netherlands on JustWatch. Screens at film museums and in programs on experimental film.
Un chant d'amour
The only film Genet made himself. Two prisoners in adjacent cells blow smoke to each other through a small hole in the wall. A guard watches through the hatch and then joins in himself, a belt in his hand. Not a word spoken. What you see is how short the distance is between guarding and wanting. Banned for decades. Twenty-six minutes that weigh more than most of the features here.
As of August 3, 2026, not available in the Netherlands on JustWatch. Silent, twenty-six minutes. Genet made it in 1950; the first screening was in 1954 at the Cinémathèque française.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
¡Átame!
Ricky gets out of an institution, kidnaps actress Marina and ties her up until she comes to love him. Almodóvar plays it as a romantic comedy. That is where the problem sits. This is not bondage but a hostage situation, and the film knows it too, it just does not dare to choose. In America it earned its own ratings category. Watch it as a period piece: less than forty years ago, tying someone up could simply be sold as courtship. In Spanish.
Matador
A bullfighter who can no longer enter the arena kills women. A female lawyer kills men. They recognize each other at once. Almodóvar treats the death drive as eroticism and hangs no message on it, which is braver than it sounds. Vividly colored, hard-edited, with a young Banderas as the boy who catches all of it. Not an S&M film, and yet closer to the core of power exchange than a lot of titles that claim to be. In Spanish.
As of August 3, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch.
The Skin I Live In
La piel que habito
A plastic surgeon keeps a young woman locked up in his villa and works on her skin. Halfway through you find out why, and then everything tips over. This film is here because nothing colder exists about total control over someone else’s body. There is no play involved and certainly no consent. Just a scalpel and a locked door. Anyone looking for S&M is in the wrong place. In Spanish.
Tokyo Decadence
Topâzu
Ai works as an S&M escort for wealthy Tokyoites and moves from hotel room to hotel room. Murakami adapted his own novel and keeps it unpleasantly sober. The clients are pathetic, the sessions are work, and between two appointments she is just sitting on the subway. It is often sold as erotica and it is barely that. What stays with you is the loneliness of someone who carries other people’s fantasies all day. In Japanese, hard to find legally here.
As of August 3, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch.
Flower and Snake
Hana to hebi
A businessman has his boss’s wife kidnapped and handed over to a rope master. This is the film that put kinbaku on screens worldwide, with Naomi Tani as the face of the genre. Be honest about what you are turning on: consent is completely absent, it is about a woman being broken, and Nikkatsu sold that as arousal. The rope imagery is undeniably beautiful. That makes it more uncomfortable, not less. In Japanese, seventy-four minutes.
As of August 3, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch. A Nikkatsu production from the roman porno series.
Bound
Bougrelle filmed in Japan how shibari is changing. The tradition was about men tying up women, and by now there are women on both sides of the rope. That is the most interesting shift in this corner and almost nothing else has been made about it. Sixty-two minutes, in Japanese. You have to work for it, because it plays at festivals and streams legally nowhere in the Netherlands.
Film page on MUBIScreening at CAMERA JAPAN
Japan, 62 minutes, in Japanese with English subtitles. Screens at festivals, including CAMERA JAPAN in Rotterdam. As of August 3, 2026, not streaming in the Netherlands.
R100
A dull furniture salesman takes out a membership with a club whose dominatrices are allowed to ambush him anywhere. At the supermarket, at work. There is no canceling. Matsumoto turns it into an absurd comedy and meanwhile asks the right question out loud: what is left when you hand over all control of your own fantasy. The second half goes completely off the rails, on purpose. In Japanese and hard to find here.
As of August 3, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch.
Lies
Gojitmal
Y is eighteen and meets J, a thirty-eight-year-old sculptor, in a love hotel. He starts with hitting and does it harder each time. She turns out to want it, takes over the lead, and after that they take turns. They let their lives go and live in hotels until the money runs out. Korea cut the film to shreds, Venice screened it untouched. Nowhere else do you see this precisely how an S&M dynamic keeps driving itself higher.
South Korea, in Korean. As of August 3, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch. Heavily censored at home; foreign versions stayed uncut.
Paradise: Love
Paradies: Liebe
Teresa is an Austrian mother around fifty and goes on vacation to Kenya, where older European women pay young men for company. She does not want to buy sex, she wants to fall in love, and that is the lie Seidl peels back layer by layer. Long static shots, no music, painful to keep watching. The power dynamic is in there unfiltered, including the difference in color and the money. A female client and a male provider have rarely been filmed this honestly.
Austria, in German and English. As of August 3, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch.
Fetisch und Sex: Fetlife
Fetisch und Sex - Fetlife: das Facebook für Perverse. RABIAT!
FetLife is the social network where the German kink scene finds each other, and this is the only serious report that exists about it. The makers set up a profile themselves, go to meetups and talk with people who have built their whole social life on it. The rotten side gets covered too: profiles that ignore boundaries, and what the platform does and does not do about it. Forty-five minutes of German, free and complete online.
Full version on YouTube (Y-Kollektiv)
In German, forty-five minutes, free and complete on the Y-Kollektiv YouTube channel.
The Notorious Bettie Page
In the 1950s Bettie Page posed bound and in leather for Irving Klaw’s mail-order photos, and became the face of a fetish visual language that still stands. Harron makes her neither a victim nor an icon. She films a woman who enjoyed the work and did not understand why the Senate got involved. Mostly black and white. A film about fetish in which no one has to justify themselves, and you almost never come across that.
As of August 3, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch.
Bettie Page Reveals All
Page tells her own story here, with just her voice, because she no longer wanted to be filmed. What you get is a documentary in which the most famous fetish photos of the twentieth century are narrated by the woman in them. Dry, deadpan, and she never buys into the myth. The hard years after her career get covered too. Set it beside Harron’s feature and you hear the difference between a portrait and a version told in her own words.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
As of August 3, 2026, in the Netherlands only available to rent or buy from the Apple TV Store.
Hope
Håp
Anja is told she has brain cancer. She is married to Tomas, played by Stellan Skarsgård, and that marriage had been standing still for years before the diagnosis landed. Sødahl wrote it from her own illness, which shows most in what she leaves out. Touch has to be relearned here, and no one turns it into a pretty moment. In Norwegian. Of everything here about a body giving out, this is the least sentimental.
I May Destroy You
Arabella is drugged and raped in a club, and for the first few episodes remembers almost nothing of it. Coel wrote, acted in and directed it based on what happened to her. The series does not stay stuck on that one night. It moves on to everything around it: a condom secretly taken off, a friend who starts to doubt afterward, someone who lies about who he is. Half-hour episodes. Nothing here thinks this precisely about consent.
The Tale
Jennifer Fox finds an essay she wrote at thirteen about her first relationship. For forty years she had told herself that story as something beautiful. Laura Dern plays her as she works it out again, and you watch memory adjust itself to stay livable. Fox filmed her own history. Uncomfortable to watch, and useful for exactly that reason: this is about the stories you tell yourself to keep something bearable.
Unorthodox
Esty escapes a Hasidic community in New York and ends up in Berlin. Why this series is here comes down to the scenes about her marriage. Sex that hurts, a body that shuts down, and a whole community that turns it into a question of blame. Filmed without spectacle and medically accurate. Four episodes, mostly in Yiddish. About starting over with a body you never learned to see as your own.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
Mostly in Yiddish, with German and English. Four episodes of just over fifty minutes.
Cloud 9
Wolke 9
Inge has been married to Werner for decades and starts something with Karl, who is even older than she is. Dresen films the sex between two elderly bodies without building anything around it, and in 2008 that was unheard of enough for a prize at Cannes. It is not about old age. It is about desire coming back at the worst possible moment. No kink. But the most honest thing here about what desire does to a life already underway.
In German. As of August 3, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch.
SM-rechter
S&M Judge
The case of Mechelen criminal judge Koen Aurousseau, filmed. His wife tells him she is a masochist and asks him to hurt her. He does it reluctantly and only really goes along once he sees how it makes her come alive. Then comes the court. There the same thing is suddenly called assault and battery, and because he drove her to an experienced Master it counts as incitement to prostitution as well. Bervoets plays a man who watches his own profession come at him. Audience award at CineKink in New York.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
as of August 3, 2026, in the Netherlands only available to buy from the Apple TV Store
Pillion
Colin lives with his parents in Bromley, hands out parking tickets and sings in a barbershop quartet. Then biker Ray slips him a note. What follows is a strict 24/7 arrangement: Colin cooks, cleans, sleeps on the floor, wears a lock around his neck and Ray has the key. They do not kiss. Lighton adapted the Adam Mars-Jones novel and plays it completely deadpan, which makes the film uncomfortably funny. The question underneath is whether Colin chooses this or just accepts it. Screenwriting award in Un Certain Regard at Cannes.
Dogs Don't Wear Pants
Koirat eivät käytä housuja
Heart surgeon Juha lost his wife seven years ago and raises his daughter without feeling much of anything anymore. With dominatrix Mona he discovers that choking gives him hallucinations in which his wife is back. From that moment on he uses her. Mona hands him a small ball to hold, if it drops, she stops: the film knows exactly where the safety sits and shows how badly it goes wrong when one of the two wants to push past it. A Finnish black comedy that cheers no one up, and that is the point.
The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief
A host club in Osaka. Men sell champagne and the feeling that you are the only one, for amounts that leave you speechless. Clennell first lets the hosts explain how good they are at stirring up infatuation. Then he interviews the clients, and you find out where those women get that money. From that moment it is a different film. The most honest documentary about paid intimacy I know, precisely because no one spares themselves. Hard to find and worth the search.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog; sold separately by the maker and sometimes at festival screenings
Love and Leashes
모럴센스
A package with a collar ends up on the wrong desk and Ji-woo suddenly knows what her colleague Ji-hoo wants. She says no at first. Then they agree to three months, on paper, with conditions. That contract is the heart of the film. Things get negotiated and adjusted, and they talk about the ex who dropped him over his preference. As a romantic comedy it is tame and too long. As a first introduction to negotiated submission it does its job better than most Western attempts.
Lasting Marks
In 1987 the British police came into possession of a videotape of men having sadomasochistic sex with each other. Out of that came Operation Spanner, in which sixteen men were convicted for acts everyone had consented to. Lyne builds the film entirely from newspaper clippings and case files. Roland Jaggard, one of the convicted men, is the only voice. No reenactment, no archive footage, only paper on screen and what was said in the courtroom. Fourteen minutes, and it cuts harder than most features on the same subject.
Full film at Field of VisionIMDb
short film from Field of Vision, free on their own site; too few IMDb votes for a meaningful score
The Artist & The Pervert
Composer Georg Friedrich Haas and sex educator Mollena Williams-Haas live 24/7 in a master-slave relationship and talk about it without a single apology. She is Black and American, he is Austrian and from a Nazi family, and race play is part of what they do. The film presents that without a narrator and without an expert dropping in to explain it. Uncomfortable, and useful for exactly that reason: it is about who gets to decide what is healthy. Barely any IMDb votes, so look for it through the makers themselves.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog; available to buy or rent from the makers' site
Personal Services
Terry Jones of Monty Python filmed the life of Cynthia Payne, who ran a brothel in a London suburb for older gentlemen with a taste for humiliation and diapers. Julie Walters plays her as a woman who is mostly good at paperwork. That is the find: the clients are neither pathetic nor monstrous, they are regulars. The film makes it neither a joke nor an indictment. Anyone who wants to know what fetish service looks like in practice, with receipts and complaints and fixed hours, gets further here than with ten dominatrix films.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog
Seduction: The Cruel Woman
Verführung: Die grausame Frau
Wanda runs a gallery on the Hamburg waterfront where she puts on paid S&M performances for an audience. Mikesch and Treut based her on Sacher-Masoch and flipped the gaze: the domme here is not a male fantasy but a businesswoman with staff. Udo Kier plays the worshipper, Peter Weibel the journalist who becomes a toilet slave during his interview. Collage-like and deliberately hard to follow. Cold too. After reading the script, then-minister Zimmermann pulled 250,000 marks in funding, which says a lot about how hard this hit in 1985.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog; too few IMDb votes for a meaningful score
Wat zien ik!?
Business Is Business
Verhoeven’s feature debut, based on Albert Mol’s book, about two window prostitutes in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Blonde Greet has her affairs in order and gets thrown by a married client. Her upstairs neighbor Nel is abused by her pimp and wants out. What the film does well is let the clients come with their own requests without laughing at them. That was new enough to get A. den Doolaard on television arguing against the film. Otherwise it is loosely pasted together and dated.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
as of August 3, 2026, in the Netherlands only on the niche service Cultpix
Keetje Tippel
Katie Tippel
Amsterdam, 1881. Keetje moves with her impoverished family from Stavoren to the city. First the laundry factory, then a hat shop, finally prostitution. Verhoeven adapted the novels of Neel Doff and leaves nothing of it standing: this is not a choice but hunger. Every man on screen offers something in exchange for sex, right down to the doctor who withholds the medicine for her TB. After that Keetje does climb, and the film is not quite sure how it feels about that. Uncomfortable and worth it.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
as of August 3, 2026, not available in the Netherlands on JustWatch
Frank en Eva
Living Apart Together
Frank sells cars, drinks and sleeps with everyone. Eva knows and stays. When she gets pregnant she officially gives him permission to cheat, after which he does it in front of her to see whether she gets jealous. So that is not how being open works. De la Parra meant it as a portrait of free love in Amsterdam and mostly delivers a portrait of someone bullying his wife. Sloppily made and not well acted. The Dutch word latrelatie comes from this film’s international title.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog; too few IMDb votes for a meaningful score
06
1-900
Two people call each other weekly on a premium phone line and agree never to meet. She calls, he waits, and that difference is the whole power dynamic. Van Gogh shot it in five days from Johan Doesburg’s stage play, with a lot of improvisation and almost nothing but two actors on the phone. When he tracks down her name and breaks the deal, it collapses. On anonymity as a condition for intimacy this still hits home. The ending is too much thriller and too little film.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog
LelleBelle
Belle is nineteen, plays the violin and has zero interest in whatever her fellow villagers are up to. Until she discovers that her earlobe is sensitive. The idea came out of Spuiten en Slikken: make a woman-friendly erotic film, paid for with broadcaster money. You feel that setup the whole film, because the assignment comes first. Kamp films the discovery calmly and without leering, and that is the win. The story around it is thin and the dialogue is not good. Interesting mostly because this was public money.
TV movie, broadcast by BNN on Nederland 3 in October 2010 and later on DVD; as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog
Suite 16
A gigolo on the Côte d’Azur thinks he has killed a client and goes into hiding with Glover, a rich man in a wheelchair. Glover pays him to do what he can no longer do himself, and films everything. The assignments get harder until one involves a murder. Deruddere turns paid sex into a spectacle in which the payer directs. That is where the fear that clings to escort work sits. As a thriller it gets out of hand and Antonie Kamerling cannot carry the role. Postlethwaite can.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog
Men for Sale
Hommes à louer
Eleven men who sell sex in Montréal’s Gay Village, followed for a year. Addiction, homelessness, violence at home, and the ordinary work in between. Rodrigue Jean lets them speak for themselves, without a narrator and without saving anyone. This is the opposite of every slick escort series. No agency, no rates, and above all little to choose from. Hard to watch and on the long side. Anyone who knows male sex work only as a luxury image should set this beside it, if only to see how wide the gap is.
Rent or buy from the National Film Board of CanadaIMDb
In French with English subtitles; only via the NFB, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog, too few IMDb votes for a meaningful score
Rent Boys
Die Jungs vom Bahnhof Zoo
Boys around Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo who rent themselves out, many of them from Eastern Europe. Von Praunheim talks with them, with bar owners and with clients, including actor Peter Kern, who simply sits down for it. He does not judge and does not invent tragedy where there is none. There is poverty and there is addiction, but there are just as much routines, regular spots and the occasional crush. That the boys are this open says something about the trust he earned. Won the Grimme-Preis. Unfindable here, and that is a shame.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog; often repeated on German television, though, too few IMDb votes for a meaningful score
Portrait of Jason
Twelve hours of filming in one living room at the Chelsea Hotel, December 1966. Jason Holliday, Black, gay, a hustler and an aspiring cabaret performer, tells his life to the camera. Clarke and her partner needle him harder and harder from behind the lens until he breaks. That is the film and that is also the problem with it: you are watching someone stripped bare by the people working the record button. As a portrait of paid sex at the bottom of 1966 it is irreplaceable. As an example of power dynamics behind the camera, too.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog; available as a restoration on disc and sometimes in film museums
All Yours
Je suis à toi
Lucas sells sex in Argentina until Belgian baker Henry flies him over and offers him shelter, work and a bed. What Henry buys is company. Lucas provides a service he is not into himself, because he is straight and falls for the bakery assistant. Lambert lets the discomfort stand: the arrangement is never spoken out loud and is all the more constricting for it. A Belgian-Canadian film that takes the subject of paid cohabitation more seriously than the genre usually does. Pérez Biscayart won the acting prize with it at Karlovy Vary.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog
Heading South
Vers le sud
Haiti, late 1970s. Three middle-aged white women return every year to the same beach resort for the attention of young Haitian men. Rampling plays the woman who knows exactly what she is buying and says so. The other two insist it is love. Cantet lets the men speak for themselves and sets it against the political situation under Duvalier, which suddenly makes it look less innocent. This is the sharpest film about women who pay for male company, and about what they would rather not see while doing it.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog
The Chambermaid Lynn
Das Zimmermädchen Lynn
Lynn cleans hotel rooms and does it with a compulsiveness that keeps everything out of her head. She crawls under the guests’ beds and listens in. That is how she hears a session between a dominatrix and her client, and afterward she calls that dominatrix herself. Krieps plays her without ever once asking for pity. Small and quiet, and sometimes too contrived. But the film understands something few films understand: that you can hire someone so you can finally stop deciding.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog
Shortbus
New York, just after 2000. A couples therapist who never comes herself, a couple who open up their relationship, and a salon in Brooklyn where talking and having sex happen in the same room. The sex is real and not simulated, and that is exactly why it works. Never a big climax, just background. Severin, the dominatrix who is sick of her work, gets the best scenes. Mitchell wants too much at once and the last fifteen minutes sag. As a picture of a scene where sex is social, it stays unique.
IMDbWhere to watch (JustWatch)
as of August 3, 2026, not available in the Netherlands on JustWatch
Live Nude Girls Unite!
The dancers of the Lusty Lady in San Francisco form a union. Query filmed it from the inside, because she worked there herself. It is about schedules, about a management that waves away complaints and about the negotiations that follow. So about working conditions, not about sex. Alongside that runs the fight with her mother, a doctor who works with sex workers and does not know her daughter is one. It looks like a home video and Query gives the other side no say. Still the best proof that sex work is work.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog
The Lifestyle
American swingers, middle-aged and older, middle class, mostly from the suburbs of Orange County. Schisgall films their parties as they are, group sex included, and neither mocks nor glorifies. That makes it seriously uncomfortable to watch at times. The conversations about jealousy are the most interesting, because that is where people admit the arrangements do not always hold. The film is technically mediocre and stays on the surface of the question of why they do this. Still rare and honest material.
as of August 3, 2026, not in the Dutch JustWatch catalog; too few IMDb votes for a meaningful score
Jeune & Jolie
Young & Beautiful
Isabelle is seventeen, sets up a website, buys a second phone and receives clients in expensive hotels under the name Léa. The money does not matter, she tucks it away. Ozon refuses to give an explanation, and that is at once his best and his weakest choice: you get no trauma and no poverty, but barely any interior either. When a client dies during sex, the family finds out and the film shifts to them. Beautifully shot and cold. Rampling saves the last fifteen minutes.
A Woman in Flames
Die flambierte Frau
Eva walks out on her husband and starts working as a dominatrix. Chris, with whom she shares the penthouse, is a callboy. They split the space and each work through their own clients. Van Ackeren films that coolly. It is work, with rates and a schedule, and otherwise nothing special. What did not work in the marriage does work in the business arrangement, until they start measuring themselves against each other after all. West Germany sent it to the Oscars in 1984. On this list, the most recognizable portrait of two people who do this for money.
Going Under
Peter is married and a psychotherapist. Suzanne is a professional dominatrix. In the studio everything is right, because there it is fixed what happens and what it costs. Outside the studio they meet up and nothing is right anymore. That difference is the whole film. The acting is wooden and the editing slow, but anyone who has ever worked with a professional recognizes exactly the mistake Peter makes and the moment he makes it.
Score based on fewer than five hundred votes, so not very meaningful.
Walk All Over Me
Alberta flees to Vancouver and moves in with Celene, who works as a dominatrix. She takes over sessions under Celene’s name without knowing what she is doing, and runs into a client who owes the wrong people. After that it turns into a crime film and sags. The first half is better: someone imitating the trade without knowing the agreements, and coming undone on exactly that. Helfer plays the real dominatrix with more calm than the film deserves.
My Mistress
Charlie is sixteen. His father has died by suicide and the French woman next door turns out to be a dominatrix. What follows is presented as an awakening, but it stays a grown woman going to bed with a grieving child, and the film never asks that question out loud even once. Béart does play Maggie with some layers. It shows up on BDSM lists because of the whip. The real subject is a power gap no one agreed to and no one can step out of.
Devot
Devotion
Henry picks Anja up off a bridge, thinks she is a hooker and takes her home. She lets him believe it. What follows is a night of games in which it stays unclear who is holding whom, and why, and whether anyone can still stop. Two actors, one apartment, in competition at the 2003 Berlinale. Count on a psychological thriller that uses submission to talk about guilt. Not on explanations.
Hustler White
Monti walks the stroll on Santa Monica Boulevard. Jürgen is writing a book about male prostitution and trails after him. LaBruce and Castro hang their scenes on that thin thread: a coroner with a mummification fetish, Ron Athey piercing himself. Deliberately tasteless, deliberately fake, and oddly cheerful. It is here because almost no film shows male sex work as something the men themselves crack the jokes about.
Bonding
Tiff studies psychology in New York and works as Mistress May. She brings in Pete as her assistant, her best friend from high school. Fifteen-minute episodes, plenty of jokes. The first season took heavy fire from the scene itself: clients as a punchline, a dominatrix who does not guard her own limits. Then Olivia Troy came on, a professional from the trade, and season two is noticeably sharper. Watch them both, in that order.
Dreißig Jahre an der Peitsche
Thirty Years with the Whip
Rosa von Praunheim lives in the same building as Lady MacLaine, who ran a dominatrix studio on the ground floor for thirty years. She tells her story, actors reenact it. It is mostly about the ordinary part of the trade: who rings the bell, what men ask for, and when you stop. Praunheim is not a rigorous documentarian and the reenactments are kitschy. Her story carries it.
Fewer than five hundred IMDb votes, so a score means nothing here.
Nebe, peklo
Heaven, Hell
Four Czechs tell what they do and why. A man finding his place in the world of pony play, a latex lover, a provocative woman and a civil servant. Čálek lets them finish their thoughts and keeps his own opinion out of it, which in the Czech Republic in 2010 was hardly a given. World premiere at Karlovy Vary. Paid for by HBO. Not a handbook and not a scandal film, just four people explaining what their week looks like.
Fewer than five hundred IMDb votes, so a score means nothing here.
Female Misbehavior
Four short portraits pasted one after another. Camille Paglia talking, Annie Sprinkle letting her audience look at her cervix with a speculum, a woman explaining how she does S&M, and Max Wolf Valerio on his transition. The film is here for that third piece. Treut, who earlier made Verführung: Die grausame Frau, lets her be someone with her own reasoning instead of a case study. Roughly shot. That fits.
Fewer than five hundred IMDb votes, so a score means nothing here.
Menmaniacs: The Legacy of Leather
Hick follows two competitions: International Mr. Leather in Chicago and Mr. Drummer in San Francisco. Candidates, former winners, hotel hallways full of leather and a whole lot of talk about what a title like that actually means and what the winner stands for the following year. This is the leather scene as an organization, with boards and obligations, in the middle of the AIDS years. Anyone who knows only the clothing sees here where it comes from.
Fewer than five hundred IMDb votes, so a score means nothing here.
Mr. Leather
São Paulo, 2018, the second edition of Mr. Leather Brasil. Nolasco films the candidates in the weeks beforehand and on the night itself. Brazilian leathermen explaining what the club gives them, in a country where being visible was becoming more dangerous at that very moment. Slowly edited. Sometimes too fond of its own subject too. That the scene is a place where you belong does come through.
Fewer than five hundred IMDb votes, so a score means nothing here.
Écrivain d'O
Writer of O
Histoire d’O appeared in 1954 under the name Pauline Réage. Only forty years later did Dominique Aury say she had written it: an editor at Gallimard, in bed, for one man. Rapaport combines interviews with reenactments and lets Aury speak for herself. Useful alongside the 1975 film, because you hear who came up with it, why, and who it was meant for. The reenactments could have gone.
Fewer than five hundred IMDb votes, so a score means nothing here.
Venus in Furs
Le malizie di Venere
The other Sacher-Masoch adaptation, more than forty years before Polanski’s and much closer to the book. Severin sets down in a contract that he is Wanda’s slave, and she plays the role until she starts to enjoy it herself. Dallamano was the cinematographer behind the first Leone westerns and you can see it in every frame. Beyond that this is Italian softcore from 1969, with everything that comes with it. You watch for the text. Not for the acting.
IMDb lists this film under the American title Devil in the Flesh.
Fruits of Passion
Les fruits de la passion
Terayama adapted Retour à Roissy, the sequel Anne Desclos wrote herself to Histoire d’O. O sits in a brothel in Hong Kong because Sir Stephen wants to know whether she can endure it for him. Kinski plays him as a man mostly testing his own doubt. The imagery is theater: painted sets, deliberately artificial frames, everything just as emphatically fake. To understand what submission is, this is not the one you want. But it is the most beautiful film ever made around Histoire d’O.
Mapplethorpe
Matt Smith plays Robert Mapplethorpe, from the years with Patti Smith to his death in 1989. The X Portfolio comes up, New York’s leather scene, the men who posed for him, all at a pace that wants to get to the next scene. Timoner shot the film in nineteen days and you can tell. The question Mapplethorpe himself raised still stands: do you document a fetish or sell it? The photos are sharper than the film.
Rule 34
Regra 34
Simone studies law, defends women in violence cases and earns extra on webcam. What she seeks out there gets harder the more case files she reads. Murat explains nothing and does not judge, and that is exactly what makes the film hard to digest. Underneath lies the question of whether you can desire violence without betraying your own politics. Golden Leopard at Locarno, 2022. Count on discomfort, not on answers.
Videodrome
It shows up on BDSM lists and usually wrongly, because this is a film about television. Even so it deserves a spot, for Nicki Brand. Debbie Harry plays a woman who says she wants pain, stubs her cigarette out on herself and asks Max to pierce her ears. She explains nothing and apologizes for nothing. In 1983 that alone was rare. The rest is Cronenberg taking your head apart.
Strange Darling
Two strangers meet up in a motel. She asks the questions you are supposed to ask, even wants to know whether he is a serial killer, and then agrees to a role-play in which he plays the killer and she the victim. Then it flips. Six chapters, cut out of order, beautifully shot on 35mm by Giovanni Ribisi. Strong as a thriller. As a film about negotiating in kink, mostly a warning that a conversation like that is no guarantee.
Oh, Hi!
Iris and Isaac go away for a weekend. She ties him up as a game, he then says he does not want a relationship, and she simply leaves him tied up. The rest plays out around that bed. Funny, and at the same time the clearest example on this list of where it goes wrong: there is consent for the rope, not for what happens after. Gordon and Lerman play it small enough to unsettle you.
Exit to Eden
Anne Rice wrote a novel about an island where guests come to find their submission. Garry Marshall turned it into a cop comedy, with Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd as undercover agents, and pushed the S&M into the background. That leaves you with a film embarrassed by its own subject. Dana Delany does her best as Lisa. The book is still there. Watch it only to see how Hollywood handled this material in 1994.
Histoire d'O chapitre 2
The Story of O Part 2
Nine years after Just Jaeckin’s film came a sequel that has nothing to do with the book. O is used to compromise an American businessman during a takeover battle. A new actress and a new story, with the same title on the box. That was the whole plan. Softcore with a corporate plot around it, 3.6 on IMDb, and that is not unfair. Listed because the name Histoire d’O still sells and this is where it lands you.
There is also The Story of O: Untold Pleasures from 2002. Just as detached from the book and just as pointless.
Caged
This one shows up on Dutch lists of BDSM films and that is wrong. Stella gets no attention at home anymore, goes to swingers clubs and erotic parties on her own, and her husband does not know what to do with it. That is swinging, not power exchange. Brenninkmeijer filmed the sex for real and thought that showed nerve. No one agrees on anything and no one talks it over afterward. Listed so you know you are getting something other than what you were looking for.
The Pet
A woman with no money signs on for six months as a rich man’s pet: no clothes, a cage, a leash around her neck. Halfway through she is kidnapped by traffickers who want to sell her at a slave market. There the film tips from power exchange into human trafficking, without naming that difference even once. Badly acted and badly edited. It is here because the director himself promotes it as the BDSM film of the year, and you may as well know that claim.
The title 'bdsm Movie of the Year 2006' appears only on the director's own site, with no jury or organization attached. Cannot be confirmed anywhere else.
Naboer
Next Door
John has just been dumped by Ingrid. His neighbors Anne and Kim ask if he will help them move a cabinet, and after that he does not get out of that apartment. What follows is rough sex, humiliation and violence, but no one agrees on anything and there is no way back. Sletaune builds it like a Polanski apartment where you no longer know what is really happening. What the film examines is the rage of a man who sees himself as the victim. It shows up on S&M lists for the violence, not for the play.
Singapore Sling
Singapore Sling: O anthropos pou agapise ena ptoma
A detective looks for Laura and ends up with a mother and daughter who have already buried her. They tie him up, name him Singapore Sling after the recipe in his pocket, and keep him busy with games that get filthier and filthier. Black and white, Greek and English mixed together, shot with De Sade in mind. It turns up in nearly every list of S&M films. Only nothing is agreed on and no one is allowed to leave.
Perfect Skin
Katia drifts around London and becomes fascinated by Bob, an American tattoo artist. He sees a canvas in her skin. Halfway through he locks her up and keeps working on her without asking anything. Body modification is an interesting subject and the film trades it in for an ordinary captivity thriller. Brake acts well and the tattoos are real, done by The Family Business. It makes Dutch lists of the best S&M films, even though nothing is ever agreed on.
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
Deuce is a widower and flies to Amsterdam, where his old pimp T.J. is and someone is killing off the best male escorts in Europe. Jeroen Krabbé is in it. The same joke as in 1999, only cruder and without the nice little layer at the end. Ebert gave it zero stars. Schneider himself said years later that the heart was gone, and he is right about that. It is here because people look up part two as soon as they know part one. Watch part one.
BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism
In 1995 Handelman filmed the leather dyke scene of San Francisco and let the women explain what they do themselves. Pat Califia is in it. No narrator, no expert stepping in to interpret it afterward. The American Family Association held the film up as proof that American arts funding should be cut, because distributor Women Make Movies got money from it. That is how things stood back then. Kino Lorber put it online restored, with a 2020 Q&A included. For anyone who thinks S&M women are something from the last ten years.
Fewer than ninety IMDb votes, so a score means nothing here. It is available to rent or buy from Kino Lorber, though, with an introduced conversation and a Q&A as extras.
BDSM: It's Not What You Think!
Twenty-seven minutes in which kinksters run through the usual misunderstandings, interspersed with short acted scenes. Janet Hardy of The Ethical Slut takes part, along with Sybil Holiday and Robert Black. Palmquist premiered it at Frameline in 2008 and the film is made accordingly: friendly and explanatory, for people who find it strange but want to follow along. As a first introduction that still works. It never goes deep. You do have to work for it, because it is nowhere else.
IMDbFor sale from the filmmaker
Just over sixty IMDb votes, so a score means nothing here. No stream and no rental service; Palmquist sells it herself.
Slutever
Karley Sciortino made eighteen episodes of just over twenty minutes for Viceland about sex as a profession and as a preference. 24/7 relationships, pet play, sugar babies, cam work, stripping. She goes everywhere herself and keeps the tone light. Sometimes that gets away from her. Just as often it wins exactly enough trust to let someone keep talking, and then you hear things that never get said in a polite documentary. Better than most of what television makes about this. You just cannot get to it in the Netherlands.
As of August 4, 2026, no Dutch page on JustWatch. Viceland does not exist here and the individual episodes are not on the official channel, only clips.
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