Flower and Snake

One of the founding texts of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno era, adapted from Oniroku Dan's kinbaku fiction and largely responsible for putting Japanese rope bondage on cinema screens. A repressed company president has a colleague's wife abducted and delivered to a dungeon, where an old master sets about breaking her, and the film treats the ropework itself as the main event. Masaru Konuma shoots it with more style and restraint than the material promises, which is why it got sequels and imitators for the better part of a decade. It is bleak and not remotely a good time, and also the reason a whole genre exists.