Trailer for ‘Hysteria’ Dances Around Its Risque Subject

There are two problems when it comes to making a movie where the main subject is sex. First of all, how do secure funding for a film that where the intended audience is adults and not teenage boys? Secondly, how do you market that films to an unsuspecting public? 'Hysteria' obviously solved problem number one, but how do they dance around problem number two? Well, check out the trailer yourself.

The bait and switch of the trailer is actually pretty funny. You think you're getting a slightly stuffy historical drama/romance set in Victorian London where Hugh Dancy will fall in love and romance Maggie Gyllenhaal, but what you're actually getting is the true story of how Dr. Mortimer Granville invented the world's first electric vibrator to cure his female patients of their "hysteria." Oh, sure, Dancy and Gyllenhaal will surely go through the whole romance thing and their love will definitely prevail despite Jonathan Pryce's fatherly objections, but this still a movie about the invention of a sex toy.

'Hysteria' played the Toronto and Tribeca film festivals is scheduled for (a surely limited) release on May 18, where it probably won't make any money with 'The Avengers' and 'Battleship' playing two screens away. Still, you've got to admire any film that attempts the Historical Drama/Sex Comedy hybrid. Every summer will bring us superheroes -- not every summer will bring us female sexual revolution circa 1880.