The challenge with making compelling art about kinks is finding the humanity in peculiar proclivities that, by definition, are outside mainstream appreciation or understanding. Focus too much on the graphic elements of aberrant sexuality, and you’ll end up in exploitation territory. Make it too palatable and it becomes erotic romance à la Fifty Shades of Grey. The trick is finding that sweet spot where the audience can begin to identify with what drives a character, even if the means to the end remain unusual.
Sanctuary threads that needle. Zachary Wigon’s tense, spellbinding two-hander offers a combination of self-actualization through dominance and submission as found in 2002’s Secretary and the desperation for one to be seen that fuels Punch-Drunk Love. (In fact, in the case of the latter, Sanctuary perhaps hews a little too closely to the prismatic interstitial sequences from Paul Thompson Anderson’s offbeat romantic drama.) In Sanctuary, the roles are reversed from Secretary (or even Fifty Shades of Grey, for that matter), with the rich, powerful male character needing submission to a dominatrix to get him off. But with each of their encounters carefully orchestrated, and of course funded, by him, there’s an interplay with who is really the one in charge. However, as it unfurls, the film becomes so much more than what it first appears to be.
These carefully crafted sessions take place between dominatrix Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) and her filthy rich hotel-heir client Hal (Christopher Abbott), who is coming to grips with the death of his professional titan of a father and wrestling with self-worth issues and the burden of now being tasked to helm a 100-plus hotel empire. The events of the film take place over the course of a single night, but the film makes it clear that this is a longstanding arrangement by the end of their first interaction—which begins with Rebecca, clad in a blonde wig, posing as a lawyer visiting Hal in a hotel room to grill him about his ability to run the corporation, and ends with her directing Hal to take off his clothes and scrub behind the toilet. Afterwards, they order room service and chat like colleagues or even friends. But when Hal gives Rebecca a $35,000 watch as a parting gift, because as CEO he feels the need to follow the words in his father’s book and “make his outside match his inside,” the dominatrix isn’t willing to be dismissed so easily.
What ensues is a battle for control of the situation, as Rebecca launches financial and physical threats Hal’s way, along with plenty of psychological manipulation. After all, who better to get inside the submissive-minded Hal’s head than the dominatrix who knows and routinely exploits all his deep-seated hang-ups, desires and emotional wounds. But Hal returns these threats in kind, flexing his financial muscles in pointing out how easy it would be to simply pay to have her eliminated. While it’s difficult to decipher which exchanges are genuine and which are part of the deviant “games” they play, that uncertainty in each situation only makes the film more multifaceted and captivating.
Written by Micah Bloomberg, best known as one of the creators of the star-studded Homecoming series, Sanctuary takes its simple premise and imbues it with such complexity that it becomes a titillating psychological thriller with a surprising amount of heart. Hal and Rebecca can only be truly seen by playing characters. Only through orchestrated scenarios can they cut through to what’s real. They find meaning through simulation, truth in emulation and equal measures of transcendence through dominance and submission. Qualley and Abbott have a dynamic chemistry that fuels their characters’ respective desperation. All that, along with themes of class warfare, patriarchal power structures and the burden of familial and social expectations deftly woven into a nudity-free psychological thriller that sizzles and simmers within the context of atypical preferences rendered immanently relatable.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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