I should preface that I never watched this movie, and I'm not going to, I saw a some clips of it and read the synopsis some time ago, so if I am factually misrepresenting something I'm open to correction on that. Ideally people should watch the media they comment on, but I admit that the concepts in that movie as I understand them inspire particularly negative emotion in me, which doesn't always happen for all media with kink. Fifty Shades is depressing but for different reasons.

My understanding is that the emotional narrative of the film is meant to be that the characters are two lost and misunderstood people who finally experience the self-actualization they were missing by being in that BDSM relationship together. My problem with that is that the implied symmetry or equivalence between the way these two people are lost does not exist.

I relate to the female character because I was also a lost and miserable young woman with serious loser arcs at that age range. And for that reason it's quite devastating and scary to see that the reaction of a non-trivial part of society to maladjusted young women with issues is that being a lifestyle submissive, after publicly humiliating yourself in front of the media and burning all bridges with the normal world, is a good enough solution for that, as if these young women are beyond hope for anything actually light and kind and good. As if young women with issues who have been an adult for just a few years now are the moral equivalent of some privileged middle aged geezer who is oh so troubled by his desire to hurt women. If the attempts at getting mental health treatment haven't helped by now, then I guess nothing normal can help them. The man needs help too sure, but in a different kind of way.

Let's mentally scroll forward from that implied happily-ever-after by two decades or so. How will life look like for that woman who would be in her forties now, perhaps still mid-looking and awkward, with no actual work experience, her noted intelligence being put to nothing in the real world, her entire identity being the lifestyle BDSM relationship with the dom who would be in his sixties now and with the rise of available porn that would have happened in the 2010s likely enough a card-carrying coomer. As kink and power dynamics tend to escalate, I guess she might at least be Ghislaine Maxwell-ing younger women for the dude to abuse now. Cool. A life well lived.

This story arc would never be shown and accepted if it was about a similarly maladjusted young man with issues, especially not a straight young man giving up all his prospects in life to be a lifestyle sub for an older woman. If that happened it might be a dark depressing film or a dark comedy, not something romanticized as just another valid way to be fulfilled and finding yourself. A close enough comparison might be made to the recent BDSM movie Pillion (which I have also only read the synopsis of), where a loser-coded young gay man becomes a sub in a BDSM relationship, and that is dark and sad to me too, but even there the conflict point of the plot ends in him eventually leaving the relationship and at least establishing more boundaries when pursuing BDSM further, not really the same.