11 lesbian and sapphic movies with age-gap romances & where to watch them

Who doesn't love a lesbian age-gap relationship? Older women are total babes, and this dynamic can also make for great fodder for a lesbian drama.

We’re obsessed with this micro subgenre of sapphic movies, and judging by how many have been made despite there still being so few lesbian movies out there, it means you all probably love it just as much as we do.

So with that in mind, here are 11 sapphic movies featuring age-gap relationships that you'll want to sink your teeth into.

Bloomington

In Bloomington, a former child actress (Sarah Stouffer) falls for her female professor (Allison McAtee) while seeking independence by going to college. The taboo, age-gap relationship ends up as fodder for the university’s gossip mill, and the couple has to face the judgment of their peers.

Where to watch: Tubi

Tár

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a brilliant virtuoso, but a terrible girlfriend. She seeks out sexual relationships with her students and the people who work under her, and even blacklists a former protégé she slept with. It’s a great movie, but definitely not a relationship model you want to emulate!

Where to watch: Peacock

Ammonite

The beautiful historical drama based on a true story features a love story between paleontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), the London housewife turned fossil hunter she falls for. In the film, Mary is the older of the two women, but that is a reversal of how it happened in real life, where Charlotte was actually a decade older. The two actresses portraying the characters are also close to two decades apart in age.

Where to watch: Rent on Amazon Prime

Carol

In Carol, the age gap between the older woman Carol (Cate Blanchett) and the younger aspiring photographer Therese (Rooney Mara), isn’t brushed under the rug, it’s a key element of their relationship, and part of their attraction to each other from the start.

Where to watch: HBO Max

Freeheld

Julianne Moore and Elliot Page have a 26-year age difference, a fact that added to the realism in Freehold where they portrayed a real-life lesbian couple who fought for queer rights in the early 2000s. New Jersey detective Laurel Hester (Moore) and her much younger partner Stacie Andree (Page) worked to change state law after Hester was diagnosed with cancer and was told that her police pension would not be left to Andree because they were a same-sex couple.

Where to watch: Pluto TV, Prime Video

​Loving Annabelle

Loving Annabelle is another taboo student/teacher romance where bad girl Annabelle (Erin Kelly) is sent to a Catholic boarding school after getting expelled, but instead of becoming pious, she forms a sexual relationship with her English teacher (Diane Gaidry). Is it problematic? Sure, but it was also vital representation in the 2000s when seeing lesbians on screen was still hard to come by.

Where to watch: Roku

Saint Maud

If you were wondering what director Rose Glass was up to before she made the transgressive lesbian erotic thriller Love Lies Bleeding, she was creating the horror masterpiece Saint Maud. This exploration of trauma, metal illness, religious extremism, and the destructive force that loneliness can be in your life, also has an age-gap relationship at the heart of it. Maud (Morfydd Clark) and Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) may have years between them but their shared loneliness brings them together before the movie pulls their lives apart.

Where to watch: MGM+, Prime Video

The Bostonians

Based on a Henry James novel, this historical drama features a romance between women’s suffrage leader Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave) and Verena Tarrant (Madeleine Potter), a radical young woman she takes under her wings, until Olive’s chauvinist pig cousin shows up and also falls for Verena.

Where to watch: Tubi

High Art

Starring Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell and directed by The Kids Are All Right creator Lisa Cholodenko, High Art is a late ‘90s indie film about a low-level editor at a photography magazine who falls for her neighbor, who she discovers is a celebrated photographer.

Where to watch: Rent on Amazon Prime

Desert Hearts

Set in the ‘50s, this lesbian classic is about a New York professor (Helen Shaver) who divorces her husband and has an affair with a much younger woman (Patricia Charbonneau). Desert Hearts contains one of the best lesbian sex scenes ever put on film, and it’s only made steamier because of the age-gap romance.

Where to watch: Max

All lesbian vampire movies

Are the actresses in these films usually the same age in real life? Yes. But lesbian vampire movies always have two things: undeniable sapphic sexiness and built-in age gap relationships. This may be less appealing in hetero movies like Twilight, but when it’s Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in The Hunger or the unbelievably hot women in Daughters of Darkness or Velvet Vampire, we are sat, despite the hundreds of years difference in their ages!