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" Over the past several years, it seems, the once-thriving Erotic Thriller has gone the way of the Western and the classical Film Noir, receding so swiftly into obsolescence that it&amp;#039;s hard to account for the decline. It&amp;#039;s true that the genre&amp;#039;s last real stabs at relevance \u2014 Atom Egoyan&amp;#039;s steamy lesbian revenge story Chloe, or the much crappier Beyonce vehicle Obsessed, both from 2009 \u2014 felt a bit creaky, maybe even old-fashioned, but if it became more difficult to take the movies seriously, it still seems odd that the genre would just up and disappear overnight. The loss is regrettable. One of the interesting things about the erotic thriller is that it, more than most &amp;quot;lowbrow&amp;quot; genres, has been the vehicle of otherwise respectable, &amp;quot;highbrow&amp;quot; filmmakers. Contributions have come from such esteemed and wide-ranging auteurs as Raul Ruiz (Shattered Image), William Friedkin (Jade), David Lynch (Blue Velvet), David Cronenberg (Crash), Jane Campion (In the Cut), and, of course, Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct).  The erotic thriller was regarded for years as a veritable playground for arthouse directors hoping to slum it for the sake of populism, finding an outlet in a genre that was expected to get a little weird. It&amp;#039;s hard to imagine now, when Hollywood&amp;#039;s target demographic has settled around 14, but there was a time when Americans could venture out to the multiplex and pay to see films designed explicitly with them in mind \u2014 serious films by serious filmmakers that were very often actually good. Because the erotic thriller, for all the superficial titillation it promised, offered audiences an experience that aimed to both satisfy their prurience and, in the best cases, challenge and compel them in intriguing ways. An adult couple might eagerly hit a screening of, say, Eyes Wide Shut with the hope of seeing Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in some steamy scenario, but what they got was (quite a bit) more substantial.  The genre can be traced back not so much to a film as to a scene within one: the murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Alfred Hitchcock&amp;#039;s Psycho, a killing that brought with it a dimension of psycho-sexual baggage that had previously never been realized in American cinema. It makes sense, then, that the director typically cited as having popularized the erotic thriller is none other Brian De Palma, long thought of as an artistic heir to Hitchcock. De Palma&amp;#039;s more-than-forty-year career has found him operating in a wide variety of genres, from his gangster classics Scarface and Carlito&amp;#039;s Way to horror legends like Carrie and Sisters, but it&amp;#039;s arguably for his erotic thrillers that he remains best known. Dressed to Kill, widely considered the very first official entry in the erotic-thriller canon, was perhaps unsurprisingly designed more or less as a direct homage to Psycho, right down to the fact that its female protagonist is murdered unexpectedly at the end of the first act. The crucial difference is that where the spectre of implied sex hung over Psycho with menacing implications, De Palma makes sure that sex gets its full due. Dressed to Kill is a movie bursting with eroticism, a sordidness that intermingles with violence until the two are inseparable. De Palma&amp;#039;s last erotic thriller, his well-regarded but financially unsuccessful heist flick Femme Fatale, arrived as the genre was winding down in terms of mainstream popularity, and that might explain his resistance to revisiting it through the second half of the decade. He made, instead, a period noir (The Black Dahlia) and a largely detested film about the War on Terror, Redacted, and after the critical and commercial failures of both, his career as a whole seemed to be waning. But now, a full six years later, Brian De Palma has returned with a spectacular, unabashed revival of his once-famous style, Passion, and with him comes a possible resuscitation of the erotic thriller \u2014 at least in some form. Elsewhere this year we&amp;#039;ve been Steven Soderbergh&amp;#039;s Side Effects andDanny Boyle&amp;#039;s less well-received Trance, which at least dabble in the conventions even if they don&amp;#039;t quite commit.      Passion (which is available on-demand now and hits theaters later this month) is a more thorough and traditional take. It&amp;#039;s De Palma&amp;#039;s 29th feature to date and one of the very best, an erotic thriller par excellence whose steaminess and vulgarity are as self-consciously invoked as they are playfully subverted. This is a genre film by a filmmaker far too intelligent and in control of his style to simple retread past successes, which is to say, like the best of the genre, it offers everything you could want on a superficial level while delivering so much more on a deeper one.  The story will seem instantly recognizable just about anybody: Isabelle (Noomi Rapace) is a rising star at nondescript advertising agency in Berlin, the kind of place where everything is sleek and glass-covered and the executives conference via Skype, and she finds herself both mentored and tormented by her immediate superior, Christine (Rachel McAdams), who sees in her younger charge a reflection of herself and therefore a threat to be dealt with. The power play that follows \u2014 at first limited to professional backstabbing before evolving rapidly into something sexual and, finally, violent \u2014 unfolds with utter predictability, but the point isn&amp;#039;t so much shopworn story as the ravishing style that contains it. For an hour-plus, De Palma has a ball embellishing the sleaziness of the material, juicing up the salacious intrigue with the effortlessness of a master, but it becomes apparent soon enough that he has more up his sleeve: The film works toward its own gleeful deconstruction, bringing as many cliches of the genre into its orbit so that they can be obliterated together. What starts as a gaudily risque bit of adult-themed fluff eventually transforms into something altogether outrageous, cranking the sleaze and the style that goes with it to eleven until it seems like a cracked-mirror version of itself. The result is oddly sublime: De Palma&amp;#039;s self-awareness combines with his mastery of the form to make a kind of Platonic ideal of the erotic thriller, a meta-exercise in style every bit as sumptuous and invigorating to watch as it is to delight in humorously. What makes Passion such a distinctively modern take on the now-antiquated erotic thriller is that it has a keen sense of humor about itself, taking its cliches in stride and exaggerating its archness for deliberate comic effect \u2014 which isn&amp;#039;t to say that it becomes a parody of the genre so much as one happily inclined to point out its silliest elements. If the erotic thriller died out because we could no longer brook its self-seriousness, Passion provides the antidote: It knows that its dialogue is cheesy and its dramatic beats obvious, but it knows, too, that we love those qualities and it lets us enjoy them. It&amp;#039;s a middle ground not unlike what so many modern action blockbusters have found, recognizing the absurdity while conceding that it&amp;#039;s still a lot of fun. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a24213/passion-erotic-thrillers/>