The Beguiled, Lady Macbeth and Carol: Libidinous costume dramas that are thirstier than Wuthering Heights

Emerald Fennell has audiences – or, at least some audiences – in a right old tizzy.

Screams and squeals accompany screenings of Wuthering Heights, as viewers work themselves up into a libidinous froth. Those shots of aspic, raw egg and Jacob Elordi in a translucent, wet shirt are enough to make people reconsider their dislike for the word moist.

But Wuthering Heights is far from the first thirsty period piece, it’s not even the 76th.

If your yearning for a steamy romance is dialled up, embrace it. Or if Wuthering Heights didn’t actually do it for you in the horn stakes, there are cinematic predecessors that captured those transgressive, euphoric feelings.

THE BEGUILED

When it comes to female desire seen from the eyes of a female filmmaker, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is steaming up the joint. The ladies here are thirsty, and that kind of carnal yearning can turn dangerous.

Based on a 1966 novel which already inspired a 1971 film, the story is set during the US Civil War, at a girls school just out of the way of the battlefield action. Almost all the students and teachers have left but one small group remains, led by Nicole Kidman’s Miss Farnsworth, who oversees teacher Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) and a group of girls including Alicia, played by Ellen Fanning.

Into their midst wanders in Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a wounded soldier and the first male company they’ve had in a long time. He flirts with each main character, seeking something different from them, but it stirs loose heretofore repressed passions that can’t be contained.

Coppola plays the claustrophobic tension with mastery, as her film seduces and, later, repels. But by then, you’ve already fallen for it.

Watch: Paramount

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

The sexiest movie ever made without any actual sex really speaks to how much libidinous longing Wong Kar-wai is able to infuse into a film that consistently makes the list for best films of the 21st century. As it should.

Set in 1962 Hong Kong, we meet two neighbours played by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. They rent rooms from a landlady, and their respective spouses are never around. Their eyes meet across hallways or walking past each other on the street outside.

When they discover their partners are having an affair with each other, they wonder how it could’ve started, even reenacting possible scenarios. As the city heats up, the steamy, wet weather swirling around them, there’s something there.

Famed as much for dream-like photography and its sensual score – in particular, the alluring notes of Yumeji’s Theme by Shigeru Umebayashi – as for the pulsing chemistry between Cheung and Leung, it’s hot. Very, very hot.

Watch: Digital rental/purchase

LADY MACBETH

If you’re after a less maximalist film with a 19th century story set in rural England that still features a scene of corset tightening, you might appreciate Lady Macbeth, which is, despite the title, not about power games for the Scottish throne. It’s actually adapted from a 1865 Russian novella.

This was Florence Pugh’s breakout role that signalled the arrival of serious thespian talent, as a young woman “bought” by a well-to-do landowner for his son, whose only sexual interest in his new wife is to stare at her nude body while he masturbates.

Isolated and left alone by her husband and father-in-law, the strong-willed Katherine starts an affair with a rough worker named Sebastian. Pugh and Cosmo Jarvis have this thorny chemistry that isn’t at all swoony but it’s definitely blazing.

She’s pushing through expectations and the restrictions placed on her, but she’s also getting a kick out of doing the wrong thing. The affair leads to some, let’s just say, deadly consequences, as Katherine strives to keep everything exactly as wants it at a time in history that says power is not hers to wield.

Watch: Digital rental/purchase

THE HANDMAIDEN

The overtly erotic The Handmaiden is well of the most well-known films to come out of South Korea in the past decade. It’s not just not all of its leads are undeniably attractive, it’s that it’s concerned with the intersection of power and sexuality.

Directed and adapted by Park Chan-wook from Welsh novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, it’s set in the early 20th century in a Korea ruled by the Japanese. A con-man devises a scheme to marry a Japanese heiress, Lady Hideko, and then steal her fortune by having her committed to an asylum.

He enlists the help of a young pickpocket, Sook-hee, to be Hideko’s maid, in a bid to manipulate and spy on his target. There are a few twists and reveals, crosses and double-crosses, but the main attraction is the unexpected one between Hideko and Sook-hee.

If you’ve been frenzied by Emerald Fennell’s use of bath tubs or fingers in mouths, The Handmaiden has her beat – that particular scene is properly charged and sensual, see if you can suppress your gasp.

Watch: SBS On Demand

OUTLANDER

With seven season of Outlander already out in the world with one more still to come, Outlander gives and gives in lusty heat. No need to limit all that salaciousness in one two-hour movie. Spread out 91 episodes, there are at least 32 sex scenes, which Vulture has actually gone and ranked.

Based on the Diana Gabaldon books, the lovers in question are Claire, an English military nurse from the mid-20th century, and Jamie, a Scottish warrior from the 18th century. Born 200 years apart has never stopped them bumping against each other, literally, thanks to the narrative device of time travel. So handy!

Among Claire and Jamie’s sizzling encounters, Jamie’s commitment to bringing Claire to her pinnacle, even with the persistent knocking at their door (consideration is hot, OK), unbridled passion on the cusp of battle, and some rocking ship sex.

Watch: Netflix

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE

When the word fire is literally in your film title, that’s a massive promise, one which Celine Sciamma’s tale of queer love and desire more than delivers. And by playing with Henry James’ classic novel, it’s also a declaration that it’s not just doing what others have done before.

The French film is burning with passion and emotion. Set in 18th century in Brittany, it follows Marianne (Naomie Merlant), a female painter excluded from conventional art spaces due to her gender, to an isolated island off the coast.

She’s been commissioned to paint the portrait of a young noblewoman, Heloise (Adele Haenel), who is due to be married to an Italian man, and the painting is for his gaze.

The relationship between artist and subject is tricky, especially as Marianne must paint Heloise in secret, without the latter realising. So, her job is to study and observe, and in watching Heloise, she really sees her.

As does Sciamma and her female cinematographer, Claire Mathon, of all the film’s characters, all these women on an island, free from the gaze of male morality and judgement.

There’s a ferocious intensity to their romance, and it’s all in the small details, like how a lip is bitten, or how someone’s breathing changes, as well as the grand, sweeping moments.

Watch: Mubi

THE ENGLISH PATIENT

When you think of romantic dramas of the 1990s, two films come to mind – Titanic and The English Patient, which also happen to be back-to-back Oscar best picture winners. Oh yes, there was a time when the genre was popular.

Titanic has been too memed and parodied to still hold any erotic power, but The English Patient retains its potency as a seriously scorching love story between Ralph Fiennes’ Laszlo de Almasy and Kristin Scott Thomas’s Katherine Clifton.

Anthony Mighella’s poetic film breathed more life into Michael Ondaatje’s book (yes, it can happen, the movie can be better than the novel), as it traverses through memory the beguiling affair of the dashing Almasy and the married Katherine. All those stolen moments, the tender touch of his hand on her back.

The forbidden nature of their doomed love, the backdrop of World War II, and the slow reveals dolled out by an amnesiac trying to remember how he came to be badly burned and marooned, has cemented The English Patient as one of the most seductive films of the past few decades.

Watch: Digital rental/purchase

CAROL

A story of intoxicating obsession, Carol is a tour de force of performance, from not just the always brilliant Cate Blanchett, but also from Rooney Mara as the sweet submissive young woman whose innocent demeanour stands in contrast to a relationship that is, especially for its 1950s milieu, transgressive.

In Todd Haynes’ adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel, every moment has significance, one long session of sensual foreplay between Carol, a high society woman going through a divorce with the threat of ruin and denial of child custody at stake, and Therese, an aspiring photographer who sees everything and everyone, especially her would-be lover.

A pair of “forgotten” gloves, the gift of a camera and film, and all that electricity is all yearning lead-up to an erotic New Year’s Eve encounter.

The bodice-ripping is metaphorical but the heat is very real.

Watch: ABC iview