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Part of the series When Carolco Ruled.
The film that transformed Sharon Stone into an international star, Basic Instinct reunited her with Paul Verhoeven following her scene-stealing performance in the director’s previous Carolco production, Total Recall (1990). It also proved a spectacular succès de scandale for the studio, becoming the highest-grossing film at the UK box office in 1992. Stone is mesmerising as Catherine Trammell, the bestselling crime novelist and suspected ice-pick murderess whose cool composure reaches its apotheosis in cinema’s most infamous police interrogation scene. A Hitchcockian blonde ice queen who appears to thaw in the company of SFPD detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas)—though whether this is genuine vulnerability or yet another act of manipulation remains tantalisingly unresolved—Trammell dominates a film of predatory eroticism that moves with pantherine grace. Complemented by one of Jerry Goldsmith’s finest late-career scores, Verhoeven’s thriller sustains an atmosphere of sensuality and menace that has lost none of its intoxicating power.