The 1970s brought a more explicit, arthouse approach. Robert Altman’s Images (1972) features Susannah York as a schizophrenic children’s author whose hallucinations involve a doppelgänger lover. Although not exclusively a "lesbian" film, its portrayal of a woman tormented by her own reflected desire—killing the men who threaten her and yearning for an elusive female other—anticipates the genre’s obsession with doubles, mirrors, and the collapse of self versus other.
The term itself is a hybrid. "Psychodrama," in its theatrical sense, refers to a method of exploring the self through spontaneous enactment. In film criticism, it has come to denote narratives focused on internal torment, fractured perception, and intense interpersonal conflict—often leading to a violent or cathartic breaking point. When prefixed by "lesbian," the subgenre shifts focus from the individual psyche to the volatile dynamics between two women. The central conflict is rarely external (homophobia, family rejection) but internal and relational: the lovers become each other’s prison, mirror, and executioner. lesbian psychodramas
Defenders counter that the genre is not a documentary but a Gothic mode, using extremity to explore real psychological dynamics. Lesbians, like all people, can be jealous, obsessive, and destructive. To demand only positive, healthy representations is to deny queer characters the full range of human darkness. Moreover, many of the finest lesbian psychodramas ( The Handmaiden , Heavenly Creatures ) are directed by men, raising questions of the male gaze: are these films genuinely exploring female interiority, or are they repackaging the male fantasy of the dangerous, seductive lesbian? The 1970s brought a more explicit, arthouse approach
The same year, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red offered a more metaphysical variant. While not overtly lesbian, its central relationship between a model (Irène Jacob) and a bitter retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is transposed in his earlier The Double Life of Véronique (1991)—a film about two identical women, one Polish, one French, who feel each other’s joy and pain across a border. That film’s ethereal, melancholic lesbian subtext (the puppet master’s female lover, the mirroring bodies) prefigures the genre’s obsession with uncanny doubling. The term itself is a hybrid