Curator Watchlist
A provocative, tragic romance that starts as a bawdy erotic comedy and curdles into something much sadder and more devastating. It’s messy, funny, obscene, and emotionally raw, with early Verhoeven already showing a taste for shock, tenderness, and bodily extremity.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 48m
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Starring: Monique van de Ven, Rutger Hauer, Tonny Huurdeman
Gifted but hot-headed sculptor Eric has a stormy, erotic, and star-crossed romance with a beautiful young woman named Olga.
Paul Verhoeven
Monique van de Ven, Rutger Hauer, Tonny Huurdeman
A provocative, tragic romance that starts as a bawdy erotic comedy and curdles into something much sadder and more devastating. It’s messy, funny, obscene, and emotionally raw, with early Verhoeven already showing a taste for shock, tenderness, and bodily extremity.
Turkish Delight is one of those films that begins as a wild seduction and ends as a bruised memory. Verhoeven frames the romance with a reckless, almost adolescent appetite for sex, humor, and provocation, but he keeps letting mortality and decay seep in until the film becomes something much more painful than a scandalous love story.
Rutger Hauer is magnetic here: handsome, volatile, funny, and deeply unsettling in a way that makes the character feel alive rather than merely charming. The relationship at the center of the film is passionate and self-destructive, and the movie understands that desire can be ecstatic one moment and humiliating the next.
What lingers is the collision of tenderness and vulgarity. Verhoeven refuses to sanitize anything, yet the film is not just trying to shock; it’s also trying to capture how love, illness, sex, and time all erode the fantasy of permanence. It’s daring, ugly, romantic, and strangely beautiful.
Magnusp (4★) · 241 likes
Is there anyone apart from Verhoeven who can make a tender love film with elements of shit, rape and maggots?
sydney (4★) · 150 likes
this is how i always want to remember rutger hauer - an impossibly young, impossibly gorgeous, incredibly deranged pervert <3
Slig001 (4★) · 142 likes
Paul Verhoeven's second feature film is this romantic drama depicting a turbulent love story between a hot headed artist and the girl he falls in love with. Turkish Delight starts as it means to go on - a brutal sequence that sees Rutger Hauer kill two people, before this is revealed to be a violent fantasy as we see actor lying naked on his bed. This is early Verhoeven but he's always known how to provoke. The film is absolutely
Diogo Serafim (5★) · 135 likes
Maggots and worms on her breasts, everything is slowly decaying, freedom is attached to time. Verhoeven manages to incorporate his erotic rawness with a narrative spontaneity that constructs such an utterly beautiful film in all its scatological approach, everything is natural, things just keep on happening as you keep moving with the march of time and dealing with the finitude of it all.
Jackie (4.5★) · 105 likes
“how is your?”“my what?”“you know, that. 🫵🏻🍆”“🙂↕️😄👍🏻” the world has not been the same since the artist lost his muse: with her fiery red hair, tenacious energy, and her luminous presence looking radiant as ever, even under candlelight — simply put, everything was beautiful with her in life. Paul Verhoeven’s sophomore film, which was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 46th Academy Awards, Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight), showcases a pair of star-crossed lovers, capturing their… more
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erotic drama, tragic romance, provocative, dark humor, bodily grotesque, 1970s cinema, European art film, sexual frankness, illness, melancholy