The taste of pain.
A woman is held captive for a month in her neighbor’s basement, where he does terrible things to her. But then one day she manages to escape, and now 15 years have passed. She has become a successful woman with a good job, but she is damaged goods. At night, when she has the time, she pleases perverted men and their fantasies while feeling the pleasure she craves, which is pain. The past will not let go of her, but she’s also searching for something that can finally set her free.
Sweet Whip is directed by a competent director, Takashi Ishii (Gonin, Freeze Me). I watched the director’s cut of the movie, which runs two hours and 24 minutes, while the original version runs one hour and 58 minutes. To get straight to the point, I recommend watching the shorter version because this movie has some long and repetitive scenes.
The leading actors are pretty good in their roles, and it was especially fun to watch Yuki Mamiya, whom I first saw in Wet Woman in the Wind. She’s hot and a pretty good actress, considering the type of movies she’s starred in.
Sweet Whip shows us that you can’t escape the past, especially when you’ve been tormented for a whole month by a crazy man. The protagonist experiences hell on earth in the basement — you know what happens to her — and she is tortured a lot.
But she manages to push through and build a successful career. However, what she experienced in the basement has created a second personality, and that second personality is pretty kinky. She loves BDSM and meets a lot of perverted Japanese men. They only get worse and worse, and there’s something brewing in the air. You just wait for her to snap. And the whip snaps a lot of times in this movie.
What disappointed me the most was that I thought this would be a much more focused movie. But what Sweet Whip delivers is a lot of long erotic scenes that mostly feel the same, especially the whipping. The whipping scenes are long and drag on, and there’s also a long scene that feels like a guide on how to tie up people the Japanese way. That’s just a waste of time for the viewer.
I felt sorry for the protagonist, especially since she has created a second personality — the creature of the night. She looks normal on the outside, but on the inside, she’s totally broken and only feels alive when night comes and it’s time to meet perverted Japanese men and the whip. But to be honest, these scenes are pretty tame and, as I mentioned, repetitive.
This movie should have been 90 minutes long because there’s just way too much repetition in Sweet Whip and too little story to tell. Well, there’s a lot to tell here, but the movie never delves deep enough into the more mature theme over the course of two hours and 24 minutes. I wish it had more normal dialogue between more normal people than the perverts who should wash their mouths with acid.