A24 to release Bodies Bodies Bodies director Halina Reijn's 2019 erotic thriller Instinct

Before director Halina Reijn had made Bodies Bodies Bodies, this summer’s millennial-skewering horror/thriller/comedy with Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, and Pete Davidson, she made her directorial debut with an erotic thriller called Instinct that premiered at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and then played at the Toronto International Film Festival later that year, but never secured an official release in the U.S. at all… until now!

As reported by Variety, A24 (which also released Bodies Bodies Bodies) has picked up the rights to Instinct and will be releasing it later this week as part of a one-night-only streaming event on the studio’s special digital screening room. It will be available as a double-feature with Bodies Bodies Bodies on September 22, with tickets on sale now for $20.

Instinct, which is in Dutch with English subtitles, stars Carice Van Houten (Game Of Thrones’ Melisandre) as a criminal psychologist named Nicoline who works at a prison. Marwan Kenzari (Jafar from the live-action Aladdin and Joe from The Old Guard) plays an “apparently reformed sex offender” whose case gets assigned to Nicoline, and even though she has “professional misgivings,” she eventually “becomes infatuated with her charismatic, manipulative patient.” You can see a lot of that go down in this TIFF trailer for the film, which certainly makes it look pretty intense (and certainly plays up the charismatic manipulation of Kenzari’s character).

Bodies Bodies Bodies had a… quiet theatrical run over the summer, so if you’re one of the many people in America who hasn’t seen that yet, this double-feature deal would be a good opportunity even if you don’t want to see Instinct. We feel like you might as well watch both movies, but we won’t tell you what to do.