Sex With Strangers directors Harry and Joe Gantz made their name with HBO's notorious Taxicab Confessions, and their film debut shares with that series an almost painfully intimate fly-on-the-wall quality, as well as a queasy sense of voyeurism. An often morbidly fascinating look into what its enthusiasts euphemistically call "the lifestyle," the film follows three swinging couples of varying ages and levels of enthusiasm. Only one couple seems truly comfortable with swinging; not surprisingly, they're also the couple with the strongest relationship, and the only pair that seems to have a sense of humor about their sex life. In one of the film's many telling moments, one pulls out a card boasting that they put the "fun" in dysfunctional, although their sex lives and their attitudes about it are refreshingly non-neurotic. Far more dysfunctional is a married couple whose good-old-boy husband is an active, enthusiastic swinger, while his emotionally fragile wife seems ambivalent about swinging at best, and traumatized by it at worst. The third and youngest couple actually constitutes more of a love triangle, since the boyfriend spends much of the film trying, without much success, to maintain a relationship with two women without alienating either. All three couples vow to separate the love they share with their partner (or partners) from the sex they have with strangers or near-strangers. But, as is usually the case, that goal is much more difficult than it appears. For the healthiest couple, swinging takes on a competitive edge: They relentlessly document their conquests, which would probably come across as creepy if they didn't seem to genuinely love each other, making their relationship work in spite of—or perhaps because of—their many lovers. The other two couples are far less successful at integrating swinging into their "regular" lives, particularly the youngest pair, an insecure aspiring teacher and her insensitive boyfriend, both of whom feature prominently in a train wreck of a wedding scene that plays like the emotional equivalent of a snuff film. Neither a celebration nor a condemnation of the swinging lifestyle, Sex With Strangers vividly captures both the orgiastic highs and nightmarish lows of stepping outside society's sexual norms. The film is ostensibly about sex and swinging, but in depicting the complex boundaries of the sexual fringe, it ends up saying a lot about the joys and frustrations of maintaining any relationship.