Do you find it difficult to find films that depict the kind of relationship you are in or are looking for? Are movies centered around the polyamory lifestyle of special interest to you?
Check out these film that feature the polyverse and its participants.
11 Films featuring Polyamory
1. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)
Directed by Angela Robinson, this fascinating polyamory movie is about the psychologist who created the Wonder Woman character and also helped design the lie detector test and a personality test called the DISC test.
William Moulton Marston and his wife Elizabeth had a polyamorous relationship with his assistant, all of them living together and having children together. They try to live discreetly by fabricating a story to explain the unusual household but their children suffer from bullying when cruel rumors fly.
Marston dreamed up Wonder Woman after discovering fetish clothing in a boutique, using his background in psychology and his interest in mythology along with her sexy and powerful outfits.
The early Wonder Women comics leaned heavily on erotic violence and were condemned for BDSM and sadomasochism. When Marston died of cancer fairly young, Olive and Elizabeth lived together for another four decades.
2. Lust Life Love (2021)
Stephanie Sellars explores the idea that there’s no such thing as “the one” and shows the joy and the complications of polyamorous dating. Perhaps it is a bit predictable and the main character is a sex blogger, instead of an auto mechanic, taxi driver, or radiation technician—that gets stale!
But there is sweetness, humor, and realism here too in the search for sexual pleasure and unconventional relationships. There’s a lot to unravel as Veronica navigates the boundaries and ethics of having a girlfriend, lovers, and group sex in this polyamory movie, but falls in love with a monogamous married man.
3. Monogamish (2023)
This Marquand Ragland polyamory movie is a stormy high drama on love, sex, monogamy and polyamory. It explores the meaning of marriage and the question of power, and the difference between love and sex. Though it is one of those movies that is glossy, overproduced, and overacted, it is a polyamory movie from a Black perspective, something we want to see more of.
4. Shortbus (2006)
Directed and written by John Cameron Mitchell, the luminary who created Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus is a polyamory movie that takes on, well, everything, with a welcome humorous approach.
Shortbus refers to a social and artistic salon of sexually diverse people, including a drag queen a dominatrix, and more. The framing of the film is both touching and funny, as it is all about a woman’s pursuit of orgasm, which she has never had. Inside polyamory and fetish experimentation, she finds what she’s looking for, along with profound human connection.
5. Four Lovers (2010)
This French film from Antoni Cordier is about two couples that fall for each other. The question this polyamory movie attempts to answer is the age old one: Can you fall in love with two people at once. It’s an artfully acted and nuanced piece that explores common tensions in the polyamory journey.
6. The Blood Oranges (1997)
This polyamory film is about a swinger couple on vacation in Italy connecting with another couple. It’s all about doom and danger, the way most polyamory movies portrayed non-monogamy in cinematic history. It attempts to be both titillating and a warning and comes across as overwrought and under-nuanced, surprising because it is directed by Philip Haas who worked on the outstanding Angels and Insects film.
It is always tricky to adapt a literary novel, something done well with A.S. Byatt’s incest themed book, and poorly with Blood Oranges, an interesting novel by John Hawkes.
7. Breaking the Waves (1996)
This award-winning Danish polyamory movie by Lars von Trier is a moody, atmospheric work that manages to be slow and sensitive while taking on over-the-top themes and an almost surreal approach to its questions of intimacy, disability, society, and religion. It vaguely summons Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery novel and verges on qualifying as folk horror.
Somehow it manages subtlety while working through issues of religious extremism and the sometimes dark journey of sexual fantasy.
The premise is that an injured man who can’t perform in traditional ways wants his wife to experiment with other men and tell him about it. She is bound by a conservative personality and a community of eerily religious people, and becomes emotionally destabilized in their journey.
8. Enemies: A Love Story (1989)
Paul Mazursky’s polyamory film features Angelica Huston. There’s a classic flavor and a heartwarming humorous vibe here, for an enjoyable romp through an unlikely story about a writer’s entanglements with his wife, another woman, and the unexpected return of his first wife, long believed deceased.
9. She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
This small budget Spike Lee film is a kind of polyamory movie, about a woman and her three lovers who all want her to choose. It examines gender and race issues while being genuinely funny, very 80s.
10. Borders of Love (2022)
This Polish-Czech polyamory movie is directed by Tomasz Winski. It’s an erotic thriller with the usual tropes that our sexual fantasies and desires for more than one lover are dangerous. Nonetheless, the film is nicely acted and brings swinging, non-monogamy, and questions about boundaries and permission to the table.
11. Ma Belle, My Beauty (2021)
Marion Hill directed this polyamory movie, one of the few to address the real-life complexities and joys of poly relationships in a natural, honest way. “A nuanced and mature exploration of polyamory,” wrote critic John Fink.
The film is about Fred and Bertie, who used to be Fred, Bertie and Lane before they were married. At attempt to bring the former lover back into their life fails because everyone has changed.
What movies that feature polyamory would you add to this list? Please share!
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