Does ‘Sliver’ Hold Up to Its Reputation as a Controversial Sex Thriller?

The trend of early ’90s sex thrillers was synonymous with Sharon Stone, and she with it. Basic Instinct kicked it off in 1992 and was utterly notorious for its blend of female-powered sex and violence. As objectified as Stone’s character was in that film, you could make the argument that she was in control of her own situation, her sexuality, the people she chose to murder, et cetera.

But not all sex thrillers are created equal. Coming out just a year later, and written by Basic Instinct writer Joe Eszterhas, Sliver once again puts Sharon Stone in the position of shocking America with her overt sexuality. But Sliver, a thriller about voyeurism and the secret stories that exist in a high-rise full of people, is not a movie that has any interest in its female lead having any kind of power. For its entire running time, Stone plays a character who’s manipulated, maneuvered, and victimized by the men in the film (played to alternating degrees of leering creepiness by William Baldwin and Tom Berenger). It’s an almost cruel inversion of the kind of power that Stone’s Catherine Tramell enjoyed in Basic Instinct. That Sliver ended up earning roughly one-fourth as much as Basic Instinct did at the box-office is of some comfort, but there’s still something icky about the fact that Sliver was packaged as the more mainstream sex-thriller. After all, Basic Instinct didn’t have a music video for a UB40 cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” featuring scenes from the movie.

Nearly 24 years after its release, does Sliver still have the power to bring out these icky feelings in its audience? Now that it’s available to stream for free on Amazon Prime, it’s probably a good time to find out.

20 Things About Sliver

1. So, yes, Sliver was a part of the Sharon Stone Smut Invasion of the early 1990s. After Basic Instinct, it was Sliver in 1993, Intersection (where she lost husband Richard Gere to harlot Lolita Davidovich) and The Specialist (sexing Sylvester Stallone in the shower) in 1994, and Diabolique (teasing sapphic husband-murder with Isabel Adjani) in 1996. Maybe it’s having just recently completed Feud, but it’s hard not to see parallels with the “hagsploitation” of the ’60s and ’70s with the, for lack of a better term, slutsploitation of this micro-genre. In both cases, the unexpected success or a supposedly “trashy” film (Baby Jane / Basic Instinct) has Hollywood wanting to cash in, but they don’t have the good roles to back it up, so instead they churn out a bunch of exploitative garbage until it’s no longer profitable and they can go back to making movies about white men.
2. To a less successful degree, Stone’s Sliver co-star Tom Berenger spent a lot of the 1990s in smutty sex thrillers himself, many of them involving lawyers defending murderous/sexy women, a.k.a. the direct descendants of Basic Instinct.
3. The cinematographer for Sliver was the acclaimed Vilmos Zsigmond, meaning that the same discerning eye that framed William Baldwin so that he could be sitting naked on a bed without showing his penis (rumor has it Baldwin refused) also framed The Deer Hunter and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
4. In case you were wondering what kind of movie you were in for, a blonde woman is unceremoniously thrown from the balcony of a high-rise in the cold open. In case you were also wondering, her blonde-ness and visual similarity to Stone’s character is used as a kind of ham-handed Hitchcock homage without any real spin on the trope.
5. The screenplay, as mentioned, was written by Joe Eszterhas, the Hungarian writer of Flashdance who went on to define ’90s smut as well as anyone, having written Basic Instinct, Sliver, Jade, and Showgirls.
6. Eszterhas adapted Sliver from a novel (!) written by Ira Levin (!!), writer of Rosemary’s Baby. You are free to infer that Levin may have had a few strong opinions about the dangers facing young women living in apartment buildings in Manhattan.
7. Sliver was also produced by legendary Hollywood mogul Robert Evans, whose life and career — where he produced such films as The Godfather and Chinatown — was immortalized in the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.
8. Stone plays a book editor (they’re all book editors in these kinds of movies) named Carly who’s coming off the end of a 7-year marriage and moving into a high-rise apartment building in Manhattan. She’s unnerved by hearing that the previous tenant jumped/fell to her death previously, and she ends up attracting the attention of an enigmatic writer (Berenger) and the building’s owner (Baldwin). One of them is secretly recording video of Stone in her apartment — and everyone else in the building — while one (the same one?) is killing people. Stone and Baldwin begin a sexual affair, and this is where the movie’s notable sex scenes come in.

9. Some attention must be paid to the character of Judy (Colleen Camp), Carly’s work friend who wears librarian glasses on a chain around her neck, speaks at a rapid-fire clip, and appears to be solely interesting in the task of getting Carly some strange in the wake of her divorce. Hyper-sexual and minding no part of her own business, Judy is introduced in a walk-and-talk where she encourages Carly to seek “new adventures, new horizons, new lovers, new orgasms!” Judy is the goddamn best.

10. Part of that Judy walk-and-talk includes a very 1993 disagreement over whether Carly should attend a Pavarotti concert (the Three Tenors were so hot right then) or go see Pearl Jam. Judy doesn’t understand the appeal of the latter. “Isn’t Peal Jam some sort of Oriental sex thing?” she later asks. Judy!
11. The voyeurism was the hook that seemed to make Sliver a “relevant” movie in 1993, coming at the dawn of the internet age and also the beginnings of the reality TV craze (MTV’s The Real World had debuted a year prior). The idea that voyeurism is an invasion of privacy is given its lip service, of course, but it’s more often treated as a kind of hot new fad. At her housewarming party, Carly and her guests take turns staring out a telescope at a couple having sex in a nearby apartment. After Baldwin’s character is revealed to be the one recording everyone, he frames it as a sign of the times.
12. What’s most striking about the sex in Sliver via a 2017 lens is how much mileage the film wants to get out of Carly being a trembling, reticent flower who shies away from these two men despite secretly wanting their attention. It’s unclear whether it’s in Stone’s acting choices, Eszterhas’s script, or Philip Noyce’s direction, but Carly’s sex scenes (including one where she masturbates in her bathtub) all seem to be moments of trembling fear. It is profoundly un-fun to watch onscreen, and the fact that it’s all filmed in this Skinemax gauzy style doesn’t help.
13. Is this out-of-focus reporter played by an uncredited Carrie Fisher? YOU TELL US! 

14. Once Carly has her suspicions raised (the old man who gossips to her about the previous tenant’s untimely death ends up dead himself), we see her researching the building’s history at the public library. And the combination of Carly’s backwards-beret and use of the microfiche might make this the most dated scene in all of cinema. The fact that it’s followed up by a scene where Carly’s wearing a statement choker is only further evidence.
15. Speaking of Our Embarrassing Technological Adolescence, there is a scene where Carly is at her office and the word processor on her mid-model Apple computer is taken over by Baldwin’s character, who types out love letters to her in real time and then draws her a rose ON HER SCREEN, and if there’s a good reason why the middle hour of Steve Jobs wasn’t about this scene, I haven’t heard it yet.
16. One of the film’s naughtiest scenes involves Baldwin commanding Carly to remove her panties while they dine in a super-fancy restaurant. She’s super unsubtle about it, and all the patrons start staring at her, and it probably took all Eszterhas had not to make an “I’ll have what she’s having” joke, but it ends up with Stone giving Baldwin this iconic look: 

17. It should also be noted that Sliver was an integral part of the Golden Age of Billy Baldwin Butt Movies, coming on the heels of his seminal butt work in Backdraft.
18. “You’ve been spending too much time with your vibrator.” “I certainly have! I’m getting a plastic yeast infection!” JUDYYYYYYYY!
19. Billy Baldwin would go on to win the MTV Movie Award for Most Desirable Male, a category that tragically no longer exists. Sharon Stone was nominated but, having won the year before, this time lost to Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice. 1993 was crazy, man.
20. The conclusion to the film is spectacularly stupid, despite a “both men are guilty” solution to the mystery that feels like it could be on the cusp of saying something. But watching Carly “destroy” Baldwin’s voyeur palace by shooting out the MONITORS (despite the servers being RIGHT THERE) is just one last piece of silliness in this movie that doesn’t seem to know the first thing about the kind of technology it’s demonizing. Ultimately, the cameras in Sliver were just another slick way to package sex scenes in a movie whose most offensive aspects aren’t the sex but the power dynamics therein.

Stream Sliver on Prime Video.