Combining the psychological with the sexual in any movie is always a difficult tonal tightrope to walk without leaning too far in either direction, but director Ate de Jong’s Deadly Virtues – or Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. to give it its Sunday name – revels in the darker aspects of fetish and fantasy.
Matt Barber’s Tom and Megan Maczko’s Alison are a married couple quite literally interrupted in the mid-coitus by a home invader, with Edward Akrout’s Aaron taking it upon himself to break into their house. Utilizing his knowledge of Kinbaku – a Japanese fetish that involves the binding and tying of knots – he leaves the spouses with nowhere to go.
However, things take an unexpected turn as it transpires that Tom and Alison have some secrets of their own that they’d tried desperately to keep hidden, with the life-or-death situation unfolding in front of them serving as the catalyst for revelations and bombshells to be made, somehow making things even more uncomfortable – which seemed nigh-on impossible given the situation they find themselves in.
Deadly Virtues isn’t exactly what you’d call a crowd-pleaser on paper, then, but the dark and dingy hybrid of marital crisis, nightmarish horror, and relationship drama under the most troublesome of circumstances has resonated surprisingly well with streaming subscribers.
Per FlixPatrol, the 2014 genre-bender has popped up as one of the 10 most-watched features among Prime Video subscribers in the United Kingdom, although it’s definitely not what you’d call light and breezy entertainment.
Published: Apr 7, 2023 12:29 pm