10 Best Anti-Valentine's Day Movies

Japanese writer-director Sion Sono has quite a knack for crafting intelligent, sophisticated, compelling blends of art house and exploitation, which prove so devastatingly intense that you're unlikely to want to sit through them a second time.

This is certainly true of his 2011 film Guilty of Romance, which casts the filmmaker's real-life wife Megumi Kagurazaka as Izumi, a sheltered suburban housewife stuck in a seemingly loveless, passion-free marriage; ironic, considering that her husband is a prominent romance novelist.

Anxious to find some spark of excitement in her life, Izumi heads out into the wider world where she finds herself offered modelling work which - gasp - turns out to be porno. Despite her meek nature, Izumi embraces her new line of work (naturally keeping it a secret from her husband), and is soon tumbling down a rabbit hole which leads her to altogether darker places.

Guilty of Romance may boast a very good-looking cast and an abundance of sex and nudity, but it's such a painful examination of a woman's gradual nervous breakdown - not to mention the breakdown of her marriage - that it seems less than appropriate to class it as an 'erotic thriller,' even though it might fit the genre in many ways.