The 5 Best Erotic Korean Romance Movies (That Are NOT 'Adult' Films)

All around the world, the past two decades have made South Korean cinema central to the media diets of inveterate cinephiles and casual Netflix surfers alike. And, within the vast realm of the country's audiovisual media, South Korean romance is a particularly fruitful and popular orchard. Whether in the form of television dramas or feature films, either you or someone you know has almost certainly had some exposure to the genre as it is practiced in the peninsula. Depending on where the media in question hails from, that exposure may have been to something pristine, soft-spoken, family-friendly, and even borderline chaste, as many popular romance K-dramas are wont to be. Or it may have just as well been to something steamy.

Erotic media in South Korea is a lot more prevalent than the near-absence of sex in some Korean streaming hits might lead you to believe. In fact, despite its recent struggles with social conservatism and moralistic hypervigilance, the country often has a much more relaxed attitude towards sex and sexuality in its mainstream, box-office-dominating films than Hollywood has had for the past two decades and change. Some of the best South Korean romance films feature sex as an overt, unrestrained component. That much is true of the films listed here, all of which go to show that the hectic and mysterious ways of the flesh are not a theme exclusive to pornography. From 14th-century palatial intrigue to contemporary gay messiness, here are five great erotic Korean romance films.

To start the list, here's a film that anyone with even a passing knowledge of recent South Korean cinema will almost definitely have heard of. One of the best, most beloved, and most successful films in the sterling career of Park Chan-wook, "The Handmaiden" somehow went home empty-handed at the notoriously masterpiece-stacked 2016 Cannes Film Festival, but the years have confirmed it as not only one of the most accomplished films of that year's lineup but also one of the very best South Korean movies, period.

In addition to boasting Park's orchestral craft at the arguable height of its power, with writing, directing, art, costuming, editing, and music all intertwining in a sumptuous unison, "The Handmaiden" also holds the distinction of being one of the recent mainstream queer films with the most upfront attitude toward sex. Following a plot adapted from Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith" in which a handmaiden named Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) is tasked with helping con wealthy 1930s heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) out of her fortune, this steamy thriller has so many twists and turns that it's almost hard to keep up, but underlying it all is a tender, intensely passionate love story between two women rebelling together against the men who control them. 

The sex scenes between protagonists Hideko and Sook-hee are famously graphic and over-the-top, but it's all in keeping with Park's maximalist vision — the sex that serves to explode the patriarchy's confines upon both women's bodies being, in itself, explosive.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a South Korean filmmaker who did more to help the country's cinema brave the repressive military dictatorship period and find liberation again than Park Cheol-su. A prolific filmmaker already in the 1970s and 1980s, when censorship compressed audience concerns over the country's problems into hit polemical melodramas that touched on those problems indirectly, Park later reinvented himself into an indie maverick. With South Korea democratized and censorship relaxed, the seasoned director took it upon himself to specialize in the kinds of taboo-breaking, sexually outré movies that weren't allowed before; his work in the '90s and 2000s was among the boldest in all of world cinema.

An example of that is "Green Chair," a 2005 film about Mun-hee (Suh Jung), a 32-year-old housewife who becomes infatuated with 19-year-old Seo-hyun (Shim Ji-ho) and initiates a torrid affair with him — even though the age of consent in South Korea is 20. In typical fashion for Park, the film observes with unflinching, unforgiving psychological attention as Mun-hee dynamites her life and even does jail time as a consequence of her dalliance with Seo-hyun. But in between narrative developments, the film also inhabits said dalliance about as explicitly as any film could without crossing into pornography. 

"Green Chair" is the kind of movie that gives new meaning to the word "erotic" in "erotic drama," using sex as such an omnipresent tool to explore and deepen Mun-hee and Seo-hyun's complicated dynamic that it almost gets to be numbing.

One interesting thing about overt eroticism in South Korean cinema is that it isn't strictly the province of boundary-pushing experimenters like Park Cheol-su. As demonstrated by "The Handmaiden," even a lavish, crowd-pleasing South Korean historical drama can feature lots of sex. And, as demonstrated by "Obsessed," there doesn't even need to be a world-renowned master with carte blanche like Park Chan-wook at the helm to make that possible. The third feature directed by veteran screenwriter Kim Dae-woo, "Obsessed" is a decidedly mainstream movie that topped the South Korean box office in its first week of release. It's the kind of elegant, respectable, Merchant Ivory-indebted period romance that Americans might associate with a PG-13 rating or an unfair R for light profanity. But make no mistake: This is an erotic film.

The plot follows an extramarital affair between Colonel Kim Jin-pyeong (Song Seung-heon) and Jong Ga-heun (Lim Ji-yeon), the wife of a captain in Jin-pyeong's troop, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War in 1969 — and, like many films about extramarital affairs, "Obsessed" is suffused with the compulsive, breath-altering allure of the forbidden. The classiness of Kim Dae-woo's framing doesn't stop him from mapping out the bottomless desire experienced down to every lurid detail — the way it alters his eyes, his gestures, and his pattern of speech. And, as Jin-pyeong and Ga-heun begin their tryst, the film's tasteful but intense sex scenes prove instrumental in demonstrating the extent to which he has fallen madly in love with her. It's textbook sex-as-storytelling.

Speaking of lush period romance films that happen to be heavily erotic, there's also "A Frozen Flower," a 2008 film directed by Yoo Ha and centered on a love triangle bizarre enough to make the members of New Order blush. The film, written by Yoo himself alongside Hwang Jin-Young, is about as gorgeous and opulent as period romances come, recreating Goryeo-era Korea with a particular eye for texture and color — which is apposite for a story that's all about sensuality and the electricity of human touch.

"A Frozen Flower" is historical fiction, but borrows liberally from the life of Gongmin of Goryeo, who ruled over the Korean Peninsula between 1351 and 1374. In the plot, the gay King of Goryeo (Ju Jin-mo) is facing political tension due to his lack of heirs, so he tasks his palace guard commander — and lover — Hong-rim (Zo In-sung) with impregnating his wife (Song Ji-hyo) in his place. After some resistance, Hong-rim and the Queen go along with the plan and set out to engage in some strictly procreative intercourse. Then, a complication ensues: Hong-rim and the Queen fall in love.

The movie is as delectably campy, frothy, and melodramatic as you might expect from that premise, and, though its view of queerness has aged a bit questionably, it doesn't skimp on the sex that Hong-rim has with either the royal husband or wife. You won't find another mainstream Korean bisexual romance with this much carnal intensity.

Gay male romance media has been a massive market in South Korea for years now; the country is one of the leading hubs of the "boys' love" or BL genre of East and Southeast Asian art and entertainment. And "No Regret" was one of Korean BL's most significant breakthroughs. The 2006 movie is distinguished by the crucial factor of having been the first South Korean gay romance film from an openly gay director — namely, Lee-song Hee-il. And that rare (even to this day) distinction can be felt on screen in every moment, beginning with the film's willingness to engage profoundly and matter-of-factly with the characters' sexuality.

"No Regret" tells of Su-min (Lee Young-hoon), a directionless 18-year-old orphan bouncing between jobs in Seoul, who eventually lands work at a host bar where he's hired by the wealthy Jae-min (Kim Nam-gil). The two men soon fall in love, embarking on a relationship as passionate as it is hindered by social and logistical challenges. The film allows Su-min and Jae-min much more complexity and explores them much more deeply than the typical straight-friendly gay film would, and its sense of humor is recognizably steeped in lived experience as opposed to tired stereotypes. But what really cinches "No Regret" as the unmistakable work of a gay filmmaker is the fact that Su-min and Jae-min have lots and lots of openly-depicted sex. Tender and heartrending without sacrificing eroticism to appease a prospective heteronormative audience, "No Regret" is a high watermark for BL.