“Love and Leashes” is the K-pop of BDSM comedies. It’s cute (ish), innocuous and so sexless as to seem neutered, in case you wondered how movie about bondage, leather and sado-masochistic “release” could garner a TV-14 rating.

A demure Korean “explainer” of a film, it dives into a workplace relationship that turns towards dominance and submission when a stands-up-for-herself subordinate inadvertently opens mail intended for her new “superior,” and finds a bedazzled dog collar in it.

Yes, their names are similar — Jung Ji-woo and Jung Joon-hi — so you could see how that sort of thing could happen. But the guy had SEX toys shipped to his OFFICE address. Perhaps that fits into the whole surreptitious lifestyle. Or maybe the screenwriter is lazy and figures anybody watching this is an idiot.

Jung Ji-woo (Seohyun) lives with her mom and suffers under a sexist, harassing, homophobic dullard of a boss, until that day a new immediate supervisor, the “boy wonder” of the company’s PR, shows up. He’s named Jung Joon-hi (Joon-Young Lee).

Joon-hi is instantly an ally, heading off the boss’s insistence on hiring a Youtube star with a homophobic past as the face of an educational product. And while Ji-woo is always being told to “smile” and “be cute” by the boss and colleagues, Joon-hi seems into her whole Miss Bossypants, push-back act.

When she opens that package by mistake, her curiosity about him grows. He leaps to the conclusion that she’s “one of us,” and before you know it, “experimenting” or not, she is.

She’s not into being dominated. A collar and “dog play” will never do.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t even like turtle-necks” she imagines herself saying (in Korean, or dubbed English), should he approach. She doesn’t have to imagine. All she has to do is take the initiative, and the next thing we know, she’s ordering him about and he’s ordering red stilettos for her so she can walk on her back.

Director Park Hyeonjin and her co-writer Lee Da-hye go to great pains to separate the “pleasure from pain” aspect of these practices from anything seriously sexual. As psychologists are on the fence about a lot of issues, motivations and forms this practice takes and what people get out of it, there’s no quibbling with that.

So this isn’t “Fifty Shades” of anything. It’s a simplistic story of the journey from role-playing to romance, with rope, duct tape, leashes, collars and hot candle wax dripping on a fellow’s back. The fact that BDSM learning curve is playing out in an OFFICE environment should make this somewhat tiresome tutorial must-see TV for any HR department.

As a “comedy,” “Love and Leashes” seems more interested in explanations than laughs, though there are a couple. And it’s more interested in DS (dominance/submission) scenarios, the role-playing games that add on a level of danger when played in a locked office at work.

We don’t really see the characters softening for each other. He’s given to weeping and has ongoing submission issues with an ex. She’s doing homework, playing more elaborate games with more elaborate controlling/pain-inflicting “toys” (the film makes a point of having her lash a table, and not her submissive partner), and it’s hard to discern exactly what she’s getting out of this.

Well, the fact that he outranks her could be part of it.

“Love and Leashes” seems far more intent on explaining and removing “fear of the unknown” and the label “pervert” from BDSM than it is in actually titillating, amusing or entertaining as it does. It’s probably more valuable in a “What’s the harm, then?” sense than in any other.

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Seohyun, Joon-Young Lee, Sanyee Yuan

Credits: Directed by Park Hyeonjin, scripted by Park Hyeonjin and Lee Da-hye. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57