Putting the Eroticism Back in Erotic Thrillers

Hollywood may have just come full circle.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a boom in the erotic thriller genre — movies revolving around hypersexual situations, often featuring protagonists falling in love with a potential killer. Jagged Mind, the new film by director Kelley Kali, feels like a rebuttal to one of the most iconic erotic thrillers of the 1990s, Basic Instinct. That movie still endures criticism for its portrayal of a bisexual temptress, one unafraid to murder male lovers, and whose relationship with another woman seems designed to taunt men. Jagged Mind doesn’t have the audacity of that film, but it does have one overflowing attribute: it’s a damn sexy movie.

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But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Jagged Mind follows Billy (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), a beautiful young woman with a nasty habit of hooking up with her ex-girlfriend, and suffering from symptoms of early-onset dementia. She takes immediate solace in meeting Alex (Shannon Woodward), a successful photographer who seems like the perfect mate. But Billy’s recurrent nightmares about her own murder, and her feelings of déjà vu keep both women on edge. Something’s not right here, and Billy needs to discover why, before her darkest dreams come true.

Something in the Air

Jagged Mind opens with a wild sex scene between two women that, while not featuring graphic nudity, does feature a frank depiction of two women in sexual ecstasy. To add some context, Basic Instinct almost landed an X rating, not for violence, but for a scene depicting a man performing oral sex on a woman.

That director Kali and studio Hulu feel comfortable enough in showing female-female pleasure speaks to the progress made in queer and sexual representation made over the past three decades. That early sex scene also sets a sensual tone for the rest of the story. For the first two acts of the movie, Kali photographs the film in a dreamlike aesthetic, featuring lots of shadows, breezes, and dark, rich colors. The atmosphere feels as humid as the movie’s Miami setting. When Billy and her female consorts touch, it seems like they’ll burst into flames.

Related: Exclusive: Director Kelley Kali Reveals the Secrets of Erotic Thriller Jagged Mind

The success of Jagged Mind owes much to the casting of Richardson-Sellers and Woodward. Regardless of the real-life sexuality of either actress, the two have undeniable sexual allure — the kind of heat lacking in recent films such as Bros or Spoiler Alert. Those movies featured queer couples with negative integer chemistry that no amount of nudity or simulated sex could make up for. By contrast, Jagged Mind scores much higher on the eroticism chart. Kali proves her mettle as a director by knowing that real sexiness comes from a psychological connection between two characters. This is sexy, sexy stuff.

Bold Decisions but Bad Last Act Twist

Hulu

In fact, Jagged Mind is almost too sexy for its own good. The plot features a third-act twist that should remain a secret to prospective audiences. Suffice it to say that it doesn’t just throw cold water on the Alex-Billy relationship, it almost derails the entire movie. Even if the early scenes do properly set up the narrative curveball, it still feels so wild, so preposterous, that it almost sinks the whole movie on the spot. Richardson-Sellers really shines again here; her performance makes the movie work when it really shouldn’t, and her ability to play ambiguous, even contradictory emotions in the same scene testifies both to her dramatic gifts, and just how much Jagged Mind rests on her shoulders.

That said, the twist does get at what Kali and her writer, Allyson Morgan, really want to examine here: themes of domestic abuse. Queer characters have come a long way since Basic Instinct; they too can now be the leads in a movie, have stories of their own, and not just exist to either A) horrify and disgust viewers or B) titillate them by hinting “Hey, I’d drop my girlfriend for a dude in a second.” Here, Billy has no secret hetero desires, and Jagged Mind revels in female-female attraction.

The movie also takes the extraordinary step of looking at psychological, emotional, and physical abuse in the context of a same-sex relationship. Very few films have done so to date, and Kali & Morgan have the good taste to play the scenes of mistreatment as more than just a plot point. If Basic Instinct’s male lead looked like a moron for letting lust draw him to a potential killer, Jagged Mind goes deeper. Billy doesn’t come off stupid so much as someone deeply in love with the wrong person. Her complicated feelings make her question her own decisions, and therefore, the audience doesn’t have to.

Wild Twist

For all the outrageousness of the film’s big twist, Jagged Mind still feels restrained as far as erotic thrillers go. To evoke the Basic Instinct comparison again, nothing here has the flamboyance of that film. Basic Instinct may feel homophobic and misogynistic by today’s standards (and by the way, it did in 1992 too), but that movie has a sense of pulp to it. It’s trash, but it’s fun.

Jagged Mind treats its subject with reverence, which is admirable, though it could have also used a peppering of smut. That also might have helped warm the ice bucket challenge that is the movie’s hard left turn. Just imagine how Richardson-Sellers would have approached an interrogation scene that had her chain-smoking and talking about sex on cocaine.

Maybe Kali, Morgan, and Richardson-Sellers will make that movie someday. For the moment, they’ve created a very polished, if flawed, film that features a few genuine thrills, and a very sexy tone. Kali doesn’t want to titillate, she wants to provoke thought and conversation about the way sexual attraction can blind people to destructive, even deadly situations. If Basic Instinct brandished itself as an erotic thriller by combining ultra-violence and graphic nudity into pop trash, Jagged Mind earns the distinction through actual eroticism and provocative moral questions. That should keep audiences drawn to it, no matter how flawed it is as a lover.

’90s erotic thrillers commented on that era’s convergence of queer liberation, women in power, and AIDS. What Jagged Mind says about the present moment is even more intriguing.

Jagged Mind debuts on Hulu June 15.

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