10 Movies That Are Even Hornier Than Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights"
Wherever you land on “Wuthering Heights”, the current box office dominance of Emerald Fennell’s latest movie is reminding the world that sex not only sells, but that people are still more than willing to sit in a room full of strangers to watch it. When it comes to tastefully directed smut, we are all, as it turns out, still degenerates—and we know it.
If you need further proof of this, it’s worth reading some of the more disappointed critics of Fennell’s movie—some of whom were apparently quite let down that it failed to deliver on the suggestive promises of its trailer. If you happen to share that opinion, or are simply thirsty for more, the following list offers a selection of some of the hottest and heaviest movies of the last ten years—ranked in no particular order and all primed for your viewing (dis)pleasure.
Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
In all honesty, we could have put almost all of the seven movies Luca Guadagnino has directed in the last ten years on this list (Call Me By Your Name and Challengers in particular). However, there’s just something so fun and joyful about the sensualism of A Bigger Splash.
Set on a sun-kissed Italian island, the film stars a rarely better Ralph Fiennes alongside Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson and the extremely beefy Matthias Schoenaerts. Indeed, this is the kind of movie where someone gets murdered along the way, and it only adds to the tension.
Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a devastating film about what it might be like to visit the ghosts of one’s long-dead parents, but it’s also a film that oozes sexual chemistry between its two central characters—who are played by Andrew Scott (Fleabag) and Paul Mescal (Hamnet).
This was Haigh’s third jagged love story after Weekend and 45 Years, but it was also his most explicit to date and, with respect to Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, his hottest.
“Wuthering Heights” fans who enjoyed that film’s kinkier moments will likely have a whale (or perhaps some other sea creature) of a time with the many sexual transgressions in Park Chan-wook’s 2016 masterpiece, The Handmaiden.
The film is based on Sarah Waters’ Victorian-era set novel, Fingersmith, but Park adapted the story to 1930s Korea, when the country was still a Japanese colony. Get ready for uneasy power dynamics and various slippery things in a gothic world reminiscent of Guillermo del Toro.
On another day, we might have included Paul Verhoeven’s Elle here, but in the interest of safety, let’s go for his 2021 follow-up, Benedetta, instead. This film is set in a 17th-century Italian convert and stars Virginie Efira as a nun with some new ideas of how best to praise her lord and saviour.
Nobody did horny and provocative quite like the Dutch icon in the 1990s (think movies like Showgirls and Basic Instinct). With Benedetta, Verhoeven basically showed everyone that he still had it.
With movies like Starlet and Anora, Sean Baker has basically made his name as an auteur of sex workers’ stories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the frankness in his work about that profession has meant that his films are rarely the kind of things you would describe as “horny”—that is, aside from his 2021 film Red Rocket.
Starring Simon Rex, this is a film about a washed-up porn star who returns to his hometown in Texas and starts dreaming up ways to relaunch his career.
Love Lies Bleeding is a queer love story with a B-movie sensibility—the kind of A24 production that mashes together a lot of things that make people happy. We’re talking ‘80s music, Kristen Stewart, bullies getting beaten up, lots of lust and desire, and so forth and so on.
It’s a story about an introverted gym manager (Stewart) who falls for an ambitious bodybuilder (Katy O’Brien). It’s fun, gross and sexy and has a batshit finale. What’s not to like?
It shouldn’t be surprising that most of this list could be described as queer cinema. As mainstream rom-coms have mostly disappeared or at least lost their confidence, LGBTQ+ filmmakers have continued to push the boundaries of the genre on the film festival and arthouse scene.
One of the best in recent years was Ira Sachs’s Passages, a movie set in Paris about a self-centred, bisexual movie director (Franz Ragowski) who ends up in a love triangle with his long-term partner (Ben Whishaw) and a young actress (Adele Exarchopolis).
Moving to another genre entirely, Ty West’s X trilogy is probably what it might look like if Sean Baker and John Carpenter (Halloween) decided to direct a few horror movies together. Personally, I think Pearl (the second part) is the best of the three, but the series originator, X, feels like the most appropriate for this list.
The film follows a ragtag crew of porn filmmakers (the cast features Mia Goth and Jenna Ortega) who check into a remote accommodation to film a dirty movie. Naturally, it does not go to plan.
After All of Us Strangers, the second modern queer classic of British cinema to make this list is Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country. Released in 2017, this is essentially the film that introduced Josh O’Connor to the world—and if you liked the actor in recent movies like Challengers and The History of Sound, I highly recommend giving it a watch.
It’s the story of a Yorkshire sheep farmer who starts to have an affair with a Romanian colleague. Be prepared for lots of rolling in the mud.
Similar to Verhoeven, Gaspar Noé has spent much of his career making movies that became famous (and infamous) for their explicit and sexual content. And similar to Guadagnino, we could have put a number of his films on this list—I was particularly tempted to go for Climax in this spot, but it just felt a little too on the nose.
We will instead punt for his 2015 movie Love—a project that caught a lot of people’s attention when it was billed as Noé’s three-hour sex film. In the end, it was actually one of the director's most sentimental movies, but it is still way hornier than almost anything else out there.
