Film

Fetishes

Name: Fetishes
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1996
Cast: Mistress Beatrice, Nick Broomfield, Mistress Catherine, Mistress Delilah, Mistress Natasha

Nick Broomfield's 1996 documentary enters Pandora's Box, a Manhattan bondage establishment, to observe and interview dominatrices and their clients. It's anthropological and unshy, approaching BDSM culture with curiosity rather than judgment. Broomfield lets the space and its inhabitants speak for themselves—businesslike, theatrical, intimate. For viewers genuinely interested in desire, labor, power dynamics, and how people actually live.

TMDb rating

3.0

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you are curious about how a niche world works from the inside, and you like documentaries where the filmmaker's own awkwardness and questions become part of the story.

Skip it if you want a film that digs past surfaces, since it mostly stays in the rooms and talks, leaving the sessions largely unexplained beyond what people say.

What it asks of you: Expect a patient, conversational pace across 84 minutes, with frank talk and long pauses rather than plot, and a tolerance for discomfort you are not told how to feel about.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

American Pimp2000

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But The subject matter is harsh, and some may find the straightforward approach to exploitation difficult rather than clarifying.

Derrida2002

Kirby Dick's intimate portrait of the philosopher at work and at rest. Like Fetishes, it's about watching someone in their element—how they think, move, speak. Intellectually alive and visually surprising for a talking-heads film.

But If you're not already interested in deconstruction, the film assumes too much and rewards little patience.

Grey Gardens1976

Maysles brothers' unblinking documentary of two reclusive women in a decaying mansion. Intimate, strange, funny, sad. The camera stays long enough that you stop judging and start understanding. Utterly alive.

But It's voyeuristic in ways that can feel uncomfortable; ethics of filming people in crisis were not the priority in 1975.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Fetishes

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Story of O1975

Both Fetishes and Story of O take BDSM seriously as a world with its own logic and ethics, refusing to treat it as mere pathology or titillation. Both are centered on power dynamics and consent as the crucial architecture.

Alain Ribière's adaptation of the anonymous erotic novel: a woman enters a world of submission and dominance with full knowledge and seeming consent. Stylized, sensual, and serious about power as a philosophical problem, not a scandal. Predates and reframes contemporary debates about BDSM.

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Marwencol2010

Documentary about a man who built a miniature village and photographs it obsessively after brain injury and trauma. Celebrates imagination and ritual as survival and healing. Tender, weird, completely unsentimental.

But The backstory involving violence is heavy, and the film sometimes edges toward being about the subject's strangeness rather than his depth.

Cameraperson2016

Kirsten Johnson's radical edit of her 25 years as cinematographer: beauty, violence, tenderness, war, all without explanation or hierarchy. About the ethics of witnessing and what the camera actually sees.

But Fragmentary and associative; some will find it profound, others scattered. Demands active interpretation rather than guiding you.

Kate Plays Christine2016

Actor Kate Lyn Sheil prepares to play Christine Chubbuck (the journalist who died on air) and the film becomes an interrogation of empathy, performance, and whether understanding tragedy is even possible.

But Deliberately fractured and self-aware in ways some find clever and others find cold. The meta-ness can distance you from genuine emotion.

The Girlfriend Experience2009

Both examine stigmatized sex work with anthropological precision and without condescension. Both show the transaction, the performance, the professionalism, and the psychological toll. Both treat the worker's perspective as the center of attention.

Steven Soderbergh's film follows a high-end escort (Sasha Grey) through her professional life: work, clients, money, boundaries, performance. Detached, elegant, ultimately about labor and authenticity. Treats sex work as a legible economy.

But Deliberately cold and observational; some viewers find it too distant to engage with emotionally. Contains explicit sexual content and assumes you're interested in form over feeling.

Safe1995

Safe and Fetishes are both 1990s films about the body as a site of absolute vulnerability and absolute control—but inverted. In Safe, a woman loses the ability to control her own body; in Fetishes, clients pay for the controlled relinquishment of control. Both ask what happens when the body becomes the entire subject.

Todd Haynes' film about a woman developing mysterious environmental illness—or is it psychological? It's a masterpiece about embodiment, power, medicine, and how the world treats suffering people. Deeply unsettling and formally perfect.

But Deliberately ambiguous and offers no comfort. Bleak and clinical in ways many find punishing rather than illuminating. The final act is genuinely disturbing.