tOuch Kink: the destigmatising film and its ceiling

Todd Max Carey structured his documentary around four words that come from the practice itself: negotiation, consent, play, aftercare. Each supplies a movement of the film. It is a tidy scheme, it is the scheme any experienced practitioner would recognise, and building a film on it commits Carey to a particular job. He is teaching.

The film premiered at Fantasia in Montreal at the end of July 2023, which is a festival with a genre audience, and it has travelled the circuit since. It is a co-production across Canada, the United States and Costa Rica, and that spread shows in the locations more than in the argument.

The four people are the film

Carey follows Grace, who sells things for a living and goes to conventions; Robin, in service to a dominatrix; Mistress Evilyne, a professional facing harassment for the work she does; and January Seraph. The best passages are the ones with the least instruction in them. Carey has an eye for the domestic texture around the subject: transport, admin, the tedium of setting up a room, the ordinary conversation that happens while equipment is being packed.

Mistress Evilyne’s thread is the sharpest material in the picture, because harassment is a consequence rather than an explanation. Everything else in the film argues that the practice is misunderstood. Her strand shows what the misunderstanding costs someone who has to earn a living inside it, and that is a different order of evidence.

Who holds the camera’s sympathy

The film’s framing of power is unusually even, and it is worth saying so before the criticism. Carey does not shoot dominants as predators or submissives as casualties. Interviews are conducted at eye level. Subjects are given time to finish a thought. Nobody is filmed from above.

Where the framing is less even is in who gets to be the expert. The film keeps returning to explanation, and explanation is delivered outward, to a viewer presumed not to know. That arrangement makes every subject into a teacher first and a person second. They are not being looked at with contempt, but they are being looked at as exhibits in a case, and the case is one they have to keep making.

The film also reaches for a statistic, offering a figure of around a third of people as kinky or kink-curious. The number is presented as reassurance, and reassurance by headcount is a weak argument. How many people do a thing has no bearing on whether it is defensible, and leaning on prevalence quietly concedes that it might not be.

What the critics said

Courtney Small reviewed the film for POV Magazine on the day of its Fantasia premiere and put the objection well. The film, he wrote, is “surprisingly tame given its subject matter”, and Carey “plays it too safe in both the way it presents the facts and its visual aesthetics”. His sharpest sentence identifies the cost precisely: “The clinical way that Carey’s film unfolds makes its depiction of pleasure feel oddly sterile.” Small was not dismissing it. He also wrote that at its core the film “is a film about acceptance and understanding” and that “there is still plenty one can learn here”.

Douglas Davidson, writing for Elements of Madness after the same festival, was warmer, at three and a half out of five, and compared the film’s manner to an episode of the old HBO series Real Sex: educational rather than judgemental. His reservations were about craft, including thin development of some subjects and a reliance on context where a definition would have helped.

Both reviewers, from different positions, ended up describing the same thing. The film is well-mannered to a fault.

The ceiling the structure builds

A film organised around negotiation, consent, play and aftercare has already decided what the answer is before it meets anybody. The four terms describe how the practice is conducted safely. They say nothing whatever about why a person would want it.

That is the flattening. Desire is various and frequently unflattering. People come to this for release, for rest, for the pleasure of being competent at something difficult, for aesthetics, for the specific relief of not being in charge for two hours, for reasons they cannot articulate and do not enjoy examining. A film built as a safety curriculum has room for none of that, because every one of those answers complicates the reassurance it is there to deliver.

Carey plainly knows more than the film says. It shows in the choice of subjects and in the willingness to stay with Mistress Evilyne when the material turns unpleasant. The structure will not let him use it.

Where it sits on this shelf

Set beside Kink, the resemblance is instructive. Voros filmed a company that had a commercial interest in the same reassurance, and Carey filmed private individuals who have no such interest, and the two films arrive at almost the same shape. That points at the genre rather than at either director. Documentaries about this subject keep accepting the terms of the argument they are trying to win, which means the prosecution sets the agenda and the defence answers it point by point. Beyond Vanilla, made two decades earlier, is the control case: it argues nothing, and it is stranger and less useful in roughly equal measure.

Fiction has an easier time here, because it is not obliged to be responsible. Secretary can let its central relationship be strange, unhealthy in patches, and funny, without pausing to certify that everyone involved is fine. That freedom is why the fiction on this site keeps outperforming the documentaries at describing what the thing feels like from inside.

For all that, tOuch Kink is the film to hand somebody who genuinely does not know what any of this is and is willing to be told. It is accurate, it is decent to its subjects, and it will not embarrass anyone. Those are real virtues, and they are also a fair description of its ceiling.