Going Under, a 2004 drama co-written and directed by the psychotherapist Eric Werthman, is one of the rare BDSM films that treats sadomasochism as a serious relationship problem. It is not selling the acts as sensation for its own sake. It uses them to look at adult attachment, professional boundaries, and ordinary life. The story is Peter, a married man, and Suzanne, a professional dominatrix. They have a paid, rule-bound dungeon relationship. When that relationship spills into daily life without a frame that can hold it, the intimacy comes apart. Everyone in the story is an adult.
The opening shows frescoes from Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries, including an angel with a whip, so ritual pain is in the film before the plot gets going. Inside the dungeon, Peter and Suzanne connect fast, and by the end of the session they have traded real names. After Suzanne quits, they try to keep the bond without the dungeon’s rules and boundaries. Peter’s attachment spills over. He starts analyzing her the way he would analyze a patient. In a diner he tries to close the distance with shared history: a shameful episode of Suzanne’s at a new school, and his own learning disability and attention deficit disorder. That outside intimacy makes Suzanne pull back. Her relationship with her girlfriend Miko frays. Peter is clumsy and distracted at work and at home.
The SM itself is shown with some restraint, and it looks like work. Piercings, pinching, and flogging sit in the film as work and as hunger, not as a freak-show display. When Suzanne goes blank at the edge of mutual sex, it plays as trauma where a professional boundary and her own desire have collided, not as a cheap twist. Suzanne goes to Philadelphia for a one-time session with an old client, arranged by her former madam, Juno. Peter goes to an SM club, cannot stay in the headspace, and stops Mistress Terry’s flogging. The same point keeps returning: outside the dungeon’s structure, Peter and Suzanne cannot build a third, stable kind of intimacy. After Suzanne’s mother, Gretchen, is diagnosed with cancer, the two of them kiss hard. Suzanne stops him before penetration, leaves, comes back, lets him touch her again, then goes blank and collapses in his arms. She says she cannot allow herself to want him. She ends it anyway.
Geno Lechner, who plays Suzanne, had no SM experience before the role. The training was convincing enough that professional dominatrices who saw the film asked if she was one of them. Roger Rees plays Peter, a psychotherapist who cannot stop analyzing the woman who tops him. His distraction at home and at work is the symptom of a relationship that has spilled its container. The film first played publicly at the São Paulo Film Festival in 2004. The next year it won Best Narrative Feature at CineKink in New York. The New York theatrical gross was thin. The Blue Underground DVD includes an audio commentary with Werthman and Rees, an essay by the sex therapist Marta Helliesen, and footage from the Black & Blue Ball, which fits a film that wants to be talked about as much as watched.
Going Under is not a how-to, and it does not offer a liberation slogan. It watches a relationship break because the two of them tried to cross a boundary the dungeon had been holding. At the end, on the phone, a year has passed. Peter wants to meet outside again. Suzanne says it will be no different. Peter goes quiet. The outside world did not fix the problem the dungeon’s frame had contained.
