
Love, lust, obsession, and the exquisite cruelty of romantic desire collide in Roman Polanski’s deliriously perverse psychosexual melodrama. Aboard a luxury cruise ship, a buttoned-up British couple (Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas) become entangled with a mysterious American writer (Peter Coyote) and his seductive French wife (Emmanuelle Seigner), whose poisonous love affair unfolds through a series of increasingly outrageous confessions. By turns erotic, grotesque, darkly comic, and gloriously excessive, Bitter Moon plunges into the murky waters of sexual obsession, humiliation, and the thin line between pleasure and punishment. A deliciously nasty examination of the ways love can curdle into hatred, Polanski’s most wickedly entertaining provocation plays like a romantic comedy dragged through the darkest corners of the human psyche.