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There’s a glass of milk waiting for Nicole Kidman in a hotel room. In Babygirl (2024), her character Romy (a high-powered CEO accustomed to being the person in control) has been instructed to drink it by Samuel, the much younger intern with whom she has begun an affair. She does, all while locking eyes with him and chugging the entire glass. Later, he walks past her table and tells her, “Good girl.”
Despite having zero nudity and barely any physical contact, it somehow became the movie’s most talked-about scene. What supercharges it is the thing Babygirl spends nearly two hours pulling apart: power. Recently, cinema cannot seem to stop asking what happens when desire rearranges who gets to be in control.
Sanctuary (2022) traps Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott inside a hotel room and turns the shifting power between a dominatrix and her wealthy client into practically the entire film. Babygirl puts a CEO on her knees before her intern. Harry Lighton’s Pillion (2025) follows Colin, a shy traffic warden who enters a dominant-submissive relationship with Ray, the commanding leader of a gay biker club. Then Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex (2026) brings the dynamic back into the workplace, with Cooper Hoffman playing an inexperienced twenty-something hired by provocative artist Erika Tracy, who takes him on as both employee and sexual muse.
Different filmmakers, different relationships, different kinds of power. Yet, taken together, they point towards something interesting happening in contemporary cinema: kink is back in the room, and not simply as shorthand for danger or depravity, either. These films are interested in the mechanics underneath it — negotiation, embarrassment, dependency, control, vulnerability and the uncomfortable process of figuring out what you actually want from another person.
Just as cinema appears willing to get weird about sex again, the young audiences watching it have repeatedly said they want less sex on screen. UCLA’s Teens & Screens research has been documenting that apparent contradiction for several years. In 2023, 47.5% of respondents aged 13 to 24 said sexual content was unnecessary to the plots of most films and television shows, while 51.5% wanted more stories centred on friendships and platonic relationships. Two years later, the appetite for those stories remained: 59.7% of respondents aged 14 to 24 wanted more stories in which friendship was the central relationship, while 60.9% wanted romantic relationships that were more about friendship than sex.
It would be easy to read those numbers as evidence of a prudish generation, but kink’s return to cinema suggests something stranger is happening. Those two developments do not necessarily cancel each other out. At the exact moment younger audiences appear less interested in sex for sex’s sake, filmmakers are becoming fascinated by the kinds of sex that require explanation. A generation can be tired of sex being inserted into stories as obligatory proof of attraction while remaining interested in films that make sexuality psychologically or emotionally consequential.
Gregg Araki has been unusually direct about that contradiction. I Want Your Sex was shaped, in part, by what he was reading about declining rates of sex among Gen Z. He has pointed towards COVID, social media and the feeling of being permanently documentable — the possibility that anything embarrassing, reckless or intimate might end up recorded — as factors in a generation becoming more hesitant to take sexual risks. The anxiety makes its way into the film. Erika chastises 23-year-old Elliot for belonging to a generation obsessed with FOMO while, in her eyes, missing out on sex entirely. Araki’s response is not to give Elliot a conventional romance. He throws him into the deep end.
Elliot is sexually inexperienced when he begins working for Erika, an older, provocative artist who introduces him to a dominant-submissive relationship. In that sense, I Want Your Sex drops him into wild, uncharted territory he has no manual for. He isn’t the only one.
Colin enters Pillion shy, lonely and inexperienced before Ray introduces him to submission and a wider BDSM community. Romy in Babygirl may be older, married and sexually experienced, but she is similarly inexperienced when it comes to admitting the particular thing she wants: to relinquish control. Again and again, these films begin with somebody standing just outside a desire they cannot quite articulate and another person inviting them across the line. That pattern might tell us something about who these films imagine sitting in the audience.
Kink is presented as one part of ordinary, complicated human desire. These characters have jobs, marriages, families, ambitions and insecurities; what they want sexually exists alongside everything else they are. More importantly, they are discovering those desires at the same time we are. We learn the rules when they do, share their embarrassment, hesitation and excitement, and follow them into unfamiliar territory.
Elliot is initiated by Erika. Colin is brought into Ray’s world. Romy allows Samuel access to a desire she has spent years repressing. None begins with complete sexual self-knowledge, which makes these films unusually accessible to the uninitiated viewer. Nobody in the audience has to arrive already understanding why someone might want to crawl across a hotel floor, sleep at somebody’s feet or hand another person control. The characters are figuring it out too.
That makes contemporary kink cinema unusually accessible to the uninitiated viewer. Nobody sitting in the audience has to arrive already understanding why someone might want to crawl across a hotel floor, sleep at somebody’s feet or hand another person control. The protagonist is figuring it out too. The more uncomfortable question is what cinema allows them to do once they’ve figured it out.
Younger generations have unprecedented access to the language of sex, all while appearing more cautious about participating in it. BDSM vocabulary has travelled far from its subculture origins: safe words, boundaries, power exchange and dominant-submissive dynamics circulate freely through mainstream internet culture. Sure, that literacy is great, but it drops a massive wrench into transgressive cinema: how do you shock an audience that already knows all the right words?
These terms can travel across TikTok, podcasts and online discourse without someone ever setting foot inside a BDSM community. Sex has arguably never been easier to talk about abstractly — while actually having it can still require the terrifying business of being vulnerable in front of another person.
Spend enough time in the online spaces where younger people talk about dating and intimacy and an equally elaborate vocabulary is everywhere. People discuss boundaries, red flags, attachment styles, situationships, emotional availability, power imbalances and what they are or are not comfortable with. Conversations that previous generations might have understood simply as whether two people were “together” have splintered into specific negotiations over what a relationship is, what each person expects from it and what they owe one another. Take away the negotiation and there is barely a story left.
There may be another reason kink feels suited to this generation: novelty. Gen Z came of age inside an internet culture designed on novelty and escalation, where algorithms compete by serving up something newer, stranger or more extreme than whatever came before it. Kink speaks to a generation constantly looking for the next weird thing.
Things become shocking, familiar and passé at extraordinary speed. When practically every desire can be named, searched, discussed and turned into discourse online, conventional sex can lose some of its ability to provoke. Kink gives sex back some of its unpredictability. Collars, commands, role-play, submission, humiliation and reversals of power introduce an element of extremity and unpredictability that a straightforward sex scene cannot offer.
There is another curious pattern running through these films. For Babygirl’s Romy and I Want Your Sex’s Elliot, kink became a disruptive place they visit, learn from and, to some extent, return from. That crucial distinction tees up a more compelling question about this so-called transgressive wave in film. Putting collars, commands and domination back on screen might look radical, but how much has actually changed if kink remains a temporary excursion before conventional order is restored?
The shocking thing is no longer simply that respectable people have unconventional desires. Babygirl assumes that a CEO and mother can want submission without that desire cancelling out everything else she is. Pillion assumes Colin can want to be dominated without needing to be cured of wanting it. What these films struggle with instead is what happens when those desires have to coexist with the rest of a life.
For a generation fluent in talking about relationships but seemingly more hesitant about entering them, that may be the real fantasy this type of cinema offers. Not simply permission to have sex, but permission to not already know exactly what you want. Gen Z audiences are questioning what sex is doing there in the first place. The 2023 researchers themselves warned against reducing the findings to young people simply wanting “less sex.” Their argument was that adolescents wanted a wider and more nuanced spectrum of relationships represented on screen.
By 2025, the language had refocused towards relatability: young viewers repeatedly rejected romantic dynamics that felt forced, predictable or disconnected from how relationships actually operate. Seen against that argument, the resurgence of kink makes a strange kind of sense.
A conventional sex scene can sometimes function as cinematic punctuation: two characters are attracted to each other, they sleep together, the audience understands that their relationship has progressed. BDSM makes that shortcut harder; the moment one character gives another an instruction, accepts a rule, establishes a boundary or deliberately relinquishes control, sex becomes a conversation about the relationship itself.
That is where Babygirl finds Romy. Her desire is uncomfortable precisely because it collides with everything else she has constructed around herself. She is a CEO, wife and mother whose professional identity depends on authority. Wanting Samuel to command her does not fit neatly beside that image. The film’s tension therefore comes less from the revelation that a woman might enjoy submission than from watching Romy struggle to reconcile that desire with the version of herself she knows how to present to the world.
Director Halina Reijn has refused to go along with treating the film as an instructional representation of BDSM. Kinkbecomes a framework through which the film can explore shame, fantasy, risk and the desire to relinquish control. The danger surrounding Romy and Samuel is equally important: their dynamic exists inside a workplace hierarchy, an age gap and a marriage, meaning that private desire is constantly colliding with public consequence.
Pillion pushes the conversation somewhere else entirely. Far from the powerful executive archetype secretly attempting to reconcile submission with the person she is outside the bedroom, Colin is shy, lonely and inexperienced when he meets Ray. Ray, an imposing biker, draws him into a dominant-submissive relationship and a wider queer BDSM community.
In Harry Lighton’s film, he allows kink to become ordinary. Colin’s submission is not treated as a shocking revelation that explains something fundamentally wrong with him. It becomes part of the process through which he discovers what he wants — and, eventually, what he will and will not accept. The central question gradually becomes not whether Colin should desire submission, but whether the relationship built around that desire actually gives him what he needs.
The film can therefore distinguish between submission and self-erasure: enjoying an unequal erotic dynamic does not mean having no boundaries outside it. That places Pillion remarkably close to the questions surrounding contemporary relationships broadly. Knowing what you like is one thing, communicating it is another, and having the vocabulary to describe a boundary does not guarantee that another person will meet it.
Those questions ripple outward into dating, work, gender, and identity, which is why these films refuse to keep BDSM neatly quarantined in the bedroom. We are living in a world where power remains profoundly uneven — between employers and employees, men and women, wealthy and precarious people, older and younger partners, and even between the identities people perform publicly and the desires they keep private. Contemporary BDSM movies take the invisible mind games we play in everyday relationships and put them right out in the open. A line gets drawn, then tested. One person gives an order; the other decides whether to bend.
And cinema isn’t the only place power is getting sexy again. The same fascination with control, performance and surrender is spilling into pop’s visual world, where erotic excess, fetish imagery and exaggerated power dynamics are having a moment of their own. ADÉLA’s KGB makes the power play literal, casting her as both ballerina and dominatrix as she overpowers a KGB agent in a campy reversal of control. Towa Bird’s Dog, meanwhile, goes straight for submission. Starring Bird opposite Katy O’Brian, the video leans into an explicitly dominant-submissive dynamic, complete with leather, a collar and leash, and Bird crawling at O’Brian’s feet.
FKA twigs takes that connection even further. Her Perfect Stranger music video moves through a series of boxed-off fantasies, each imagining a different version of intimacy with someone she barely knows. Among them is an explicitly S&M-coded scenario: twigs, dressed in leather lingerie, walks as a dominant figure strikes her with a riding crop. It sits alongside fantasies of domesticity and anonymous desire, making kink one possibility in a whole catalogue of projected relationships.
As for Sabrina Carpenter, the singer takes a campier route with Tears, dropping Carpenter into a Rocky Horror Picture Show-inspired world alongside Colman Domingo in drag, as she wanders into a strange house filled with eclectic characters and sexual theatricality. Carpenter has described Man’s Best Friend as being partly about knowing when you’re in control, when you aren’t, and when surrendering that control is itself a choice.
Different fantasies, same preoccupation. Across film and music, sex is becoming stranger and more performative again. The provocation lies in playing with the surrounding language of sex: domination, surrender, voyeurism, performance, and the tension between the respectable person somebody performs in public and whatever they might want in private.
