Killing Me Softly is a 2002 erotic thriller directed by Chen Kaige and starring Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes.
Alice (Graham) lives in London with her sweet but dull boyfriend. After a chance sexual encounter with a mysterious man (Fiennes), she tracks him down and learns he is Adam Tallis, a famous mountaineer who saved the lives of six people in an accident that killed many others. Alice leaves her boyfriend and starts a relationship with Adam.
Killing seems like an experiment in how many red flags a man can have and still be attractive. Adam is brooding, mercurial, controlling and haunted by the accident, in which the woman he loved died. When Alice is mugged on the street, Adam doesn’t just chase the assailant down, he brutally beats him, then immediately proposes marriage to Alice.
Alice and Adam are wed. Their honeymoon involves hiking to a remote cabin in the woods, where Adam combines intercourse with breath play in an elaborate setup using long silk scarves. There’s no build-up to this beyond Adam asking, “Do you trust me?”, nor is there any indication Alice has done anything like this. In theory, Alice could just lean backwards and release the pressure on her throat, but it’s still not treated with the gravity it deserves.
The story moves into a gothic/Bluebeard phase as Alice realizes she knows almost nothing about her new husband, and there are a lot of questions about his past and other women he’s been involved with, including a rape allegation and a possible murder. Alice chases down leads and starts lying to Adam.
This leads to the second bondage scene, in which Adam ties Alice, in her short robe, to their kitchen table and accuses her of having an affair behind his back. The scene’s drama is undercut by the fact that the ropes are so soft and loose that it looks like Alice could just pull her wrists out of them with little effort. It resembles a work of “tasteful” bondage erotica, rather than a real example of domestic partner violence. Adam releases Alice, who later runs off in the night, just in her robe. The police prove useless, and Alice partners with Deborah, Adam’s sister, to find the body of Adam’s former lover.
Deborah reveals herself as Adam’s incestuous lover, who introduced him to silk scarves, bondage and breathplay. Furthermore, she killed any other woman in his life. In an act of psychological splitting, Adam’s negative qualities, i.e. his potential of violence and his kinkiness, are displaced from him and projected onto Deborah.
At least Adam and Alice don’t live happily ever after. They see each other once, years later, but say nothing. Alice’s voiceover explains that she is temperamentally unsuited to life with someone like Adam.
Killing avoids dealing with female masochism, with the question of why women can be attracted to volatile, controlling men. It’s unable, or unwilling, to walk the fine line of a woman being out of control, and liking it. Combined with the overly pretty design, and it’s just lacking the edge of a real erotic thriller.
This movie was released the same year as Secretary, and you could see it as part of the ongoing attempt to domesticate kink for mainstream audiences. It’s a little too soft for the erotic thriller audience, and a little too hard for the audience that liked Secretary.
