You know when a romcom or a fluffy, safe romance just doesn’t cut it? You want action and suspense. You want thrilling and passionate but you don’t want a shoot-em up fest. Immerse yourself into the enthralling world of obsessive love, intense passion and magnetic attraction for a movie experience that stirs the soul and makes you a little bit frightened about the power of love.
1 The Piano Teacher
A dark story about a repressed middle-aged Austrian piano teacher who begins an illicit and dangerous affair with one of her teenage students.
2 Shame
Michael Fassbender stars as a successful New Yorker who lives a seemingly normal life but hides a secret of gratuitous sex addiction that makes him numb to pretty much all human emotion.
3 Damage
An upper-class British politician lives in a dull marriage that is turned upside when he succumbs to the temptation of a passionate affair with his son’s fiancée.
4 Body Heat
William Hurt plays a powerful lawyer who begins a risky affair with the wife of a wealth Florida businessman. Kathleen Turner gives a career defining performance as the seductress.
5 Lolita
A literary classic brought to life in this 1997 remake starring Jeremy Irons about an adult man who develops a dangerous obsession with a young girl, who worryingly reciprocates.
6 Boxing Helena
A real ‘romantic’ mystery movie about a rich surgeon played by Julian Sands who begins operating on the object of his obsession - his aloof and immensely disfigured neighbor played by Sherilyn Fenn.
7 Intimacy
Mark Rylance plays a man who decides that he wants to get to know more about the mysterious woman with whom he has weekly sexual encounters.
8 Original Sin
Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie sizzle on screen together as a married couple who seem to want to take their relationship to the absolute limit in all senses.
9 Belle De Seigneur (the Passion of War)
Set in the turbulent period of growing Fascism in 20th century Europe, a high-ranking Jewish officer begins a doomed affair with a married woman.
10 Sliver
Sharon Stone plays a book editor who unwittingly becomes involved with the prime suspect in a serial killer investigation that has seen grisly deaths of several innocent women.
11 Fear
Reese Witherspoon plays a 16-year-old who begins a relationship with a seemingly sweet 23-year-old (Mark Wahlberg), who wins over her family with the exception of her father who can sense a disturbing undertone.
12 The Piano
An intense masterpiece about a mute woman and her daughter who emigrate to New Zealand, with the mute woman sold into marriage yet unavoidably attracted to another.
13 Beautiful Creatures
A young Kate Winslet stars in this disturbing film about an intense female teenage friendship and the devastation that is causes for both sets of families involved.
14 Unfaithful
An erotic thriller starring Richard Gere about a man who discovers his wife has been unfaithful and falls down a rabbit hole of unpleasant discovery.
15 Lie with Me
Two passionate people meet at a club and immediately fall in to an intense and consuming romance, but they soon start to discover all the ramifications of being so careless in love.
16 Blue Velvet
A brilliant thriller starring Dennis Hopper as a sexually depraved psychopath at the center of a strange criminal investigation.
17 Last Tango in Paris
After the suicide of his wife, a man played by Marlon Brando begins a sordid and emotionally detached affair with a young woman where he revels in testing the boundaries and limits of their relationship.
If you watched all of these one after another it would leave you thinking how dark and sordid love can be. They’re certainly different to happy ever after stories.
