IN 1989, Steven Soderbergh was the new subversive name on the block with sex, lies and videotape. In 2003, Steven Shainberg matches him, inviting James Spader to do his introverted oddball thing again, as legal services take on a whole new meaning in the Secretary, winner of a special prize for originality at the Sundance film festival.

Original it is too, in its unconventional, black-humoured, swish handling of adult material. When masochistic secretary Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) looks directly at you for seemingly an age as the film ends, without actually saying anything, she seems to be asking Would you do the same? Do you do the same? Isn't there a little bit of weird in you too?

What Lee does, within a day of her release from institutional care after a nervous breakdown, is return to her habit of mutilating herself. To break the chain, she applies for her first job, as a secretary to Mr E Edward Grey (Spader), a one-man law firm and deviant control freak. So begin the games of mind and body and sex, sadistic and masochist games where Shainberg lets them play without being the moral referee. Like the audience, he stands back and watches this unorthodox office romance, involving spanking, dead worms and lots of red ink.

Far from being porn under an arthouse front, Secretary is a study of pain and pleasure and pleasure in pain, a love story from the darker side of human nature. Erotic or neurotic? You decide.

Updated: 11:31 Friday, June 13, 2003