Film

The Duke of Burgundy

Name: The Duke of Burgundy
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 2015
Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Chiara D'Anna, Eugenia Caruso, Zita Kraszkó, Monica Swinn

Peter Strickland's hypnotic, all-female fantasia follows Cynthia and Evelyn through a strict daily ritual of dominance and submission — and the quiet exhaustion that sets in when a fantasy becomes routine. Shot like a fever dream of moths, wood-panelled rooms and 1970s giallo scores, it's less about sex than about the negotiations any long relationship runs on. Gorgeous, slow, tender underneath the leather.

TMDb rating

6.3

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But Buñuel's surrealism can feel opaque and cold rather than erotic, and its 1967 gender politics haven't aged gently.

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A genuinely romantic, funny take on submission and dominance between a lawyer and his new secretary, treating kink as a language of care rather than shame or spectacle.

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Strickland's earlier film, a queasy descent into the sound design of a 1970s Italian horror movie, shares the same saturated colour, dread and obsession with texture and repetition.

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Something you would not have found on your own.

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Same engine as Strickland's film — two people trapped in a domestic routine, quietly renegotiating who plays which role — but stripped of costume, colour and any erotic frame, just a heterosexual couple talking it out.

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Isabelle Huppert is devastating as a repressed music teacher whose desires curdle into something much darker, a colder, more punishing cousin to Cynthia and Evelyn's negotiated fantasy.

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In the Realm of the Senses1976no page yet

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Carol2015

Todd Haynes' lush, period-perfect romance between two women shares Strickland's devotion to texture, colour and the unspoken rules governing who gets to want what.

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