A steamy erotic thriller so convincing it courted controversy gives in to desire on streaming

If there’s one thing any decent erotic thriller seeks to accomplish, it’s onscreen amorousness. There’s no point selling an entire movie on the back of beautiful people doing salacious things to each other if you can’t hold up that end of the bargain, but 2001’s Original Sin did it perhaps a little too well.

Even though the period piece was savaged by critics to the tune of a paltry 12 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, the lovemaking proved to be so convincing that it created rumor, speculation, innuendo, hearsay. Obviously, that’s par for the course when you’ve got the smoldering duo of Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie in the lead roles, but controversy nonetheless lingered in the background.

Whispers emerged during production that Banderas’ then-wife Melanie Griffith was growing increasingly convinced an offscreen affair was ongoing, while the inevitable urban myths circulated that the central duo were copulating for real when the cameras were rolling, with a tour de force romp that bends them into all sorts of unwieldy positions getting folks hot under the collar in more ways than one.

It would appear that streaming subscribers are deigning to decipher if the romping was real or rehearsed, though, with Original Sin having made a charge up the streaming charts. As per FlixPatrol, the near universally-panned tale of love, lust, and desire is close to reaching climax on the iTunes rankings, over 20 years after message boards in the age of dial-up were swamped by theories as to whether or not Jolie and Banderas’ beast with two backs was fictional or full-on.