One again, streaming subscribers have proven themselves incapable of avoiding temptation and checking out an erotically-charged movie that’s available at the push of a button, even though they might not get exactly what they wanted by the time the credits come up on Female Perversions.
To be fair, it does live up to the title and then some, but director Susan Streitfeld’s adaptation of Louise J. Kaplan’s novel is a lot more introspective, psychological, and altogether existential than some of the smuttier titles to have recently captured the imagination on-demand.
Anchored by a predictably strong Tilda Swinton performance, Female Perversion finds the future Academy Award winner’s Evelyn seeking to make the jump from lawyer to judge, but her personal life is nowhere near as fulfilling as her professional one. She’s got a boyfriend and a female lover on the side, but she only sees them as vessels for meaningless sex and nothing else.
Once her sister gets busted for shoplifting and forces her to head out on a sibling rescue mission, the protagonist ends up reckoning with the sins of the past and how they ended up influencing and defining not just her past, but potential future. Make no mistake, though, there is plenty of skin to be shown in Female Perversions as you’d expect from the title, but a fractured non-linear narrative and loose sense of structure create an almost dreamlike quality that split audiences and critics in two the first time around.
Then again, the fact it’s currently one of the Top 10 most popular features on ad-supported platform Freevee (per FlixPatrol) shows that reviews don’t mean a thing, not that we’re suggesting sheer titillation is the number one cause behind the film’s newfound surge.