A person hires a dominatrix for the same reason they subscribe to organized religion: to give themselves over to a higher power. In Zachary Wigon’s terrific two-hander “Sanctuary,” he invests the dynamic between a roleplaying sex worker and her longest-term client with all the devotional, frustrated intensity of an implacable deity and the quavering mortal who labors to appease her. (It’s no coincidence that guys like this are always calling their dommes “goddesses.”) She gets money and perhaps some personal fulfillment from her work; he gets purpose and certainty, the messiness of life reorganized into a clear-cut program of tasks to be carried out and approvals to be earned. It’s a symbiotic system maintained through a set of agreed-upon premises and boundaries, and though the sessions hinge on assumed personae for both parties, the emotional responses generated therein are nonetheless real.
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Wigon’s sleek, seductive drama — as contained and actor-driven as a stage play, though shot so expressively that it could only be cinema — breaks down this pairing just to build it back up from scratch, testing the viability of a connection rooted in guarded performance as it crawls on all fours toward a more open, authentic intimacy. Over the course of one long night in an immaculately appointed suite, the sparring partners will peel back the layers of artifice and posturing between them until nothing remains, then attempt to fill the blank space with their preferred versions of themselves.
It’s an oddly similar setup to 2018’s “Piercing,” another tete-a-tete between a blonde-bobbed BDSM specialist and a john played by Christopher Abbott. Where the earlier film was opaque and abstract in its construction of symbolic meaning, however, Wigon opts for a direct, increasingly transparent vulnerability. In time, all the berating and belittling will be revealed as a love language like any other, its distinct terms giving way to the same negotiations faced by any couple. The infatuation of worship must eventually come home and cool into something that can last. The goddess is human, after all.
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Abbott portrays Hal (as in the rudderless Shakespearean prince), heir to a hotel empire he’s preparing to reign over in the wake of his winning-obsessed father’s death. In the legal meeting that opens the film, the lawyer’s questioning paints the picture of a hard-partying playboy, though that’s just the first mask to be removed. He’s actually a meek beta male more interested in the fortune coming his way than being a CEO in cutthroat corporate America, and she’s actually Rebecca (Margaret Qualley, in a career-best), the woman he’s paid to treat him like a worm for several years.
After they’ve completed that evening’s exercise, the room service and cordial conversation they share suggest the sort of arm’s-length professional friendship one might cultivate with a favored coworker. And so when he apprehensively floats the idea of terminating their meetups once he moves into the C-suite, her immediate animosity could go either way — is it the hurt of rejection from someone she’d come to care for, or the resentment of an employee suddenly losing the meal ticket of a lifetime? Are those mutually exclusive?
As the volley of threats, blackmail, begging, and tentative confessions carries them into the wee small hours, they take turns trading the upper hand back and forth, and with each reversal, trying on different iterations of their relationship.
The mutating script from Micah Bloomberg (perhaps best known as the co-creator of Amazon’s streaming series “Homecoming”) wants to keep us on our toes with its consistent state of flux, but Ludovica Isidori’s acrobatic cinematography is key to the unpredictability in a film that dares us to guess where it’s headed. From the opening shot that begins as a POV from Hal until it tilts upside-down to glare back at him, she excels at using slow camera movement to transform the significance of a shot, her topsy-turviness a tactful way to visually chart the shifting balance of authority.
Yet if this is anyone’s showcase, it’s Abbott and Qualley’s, two versatile young talents at the top of their respective classes in the American independent circuit. They both strike a deft balance between the legibility of feeling that guides viewers from one juncture to the next despite actions that often seem counterintuitive and a closed-off apprehension that leaves enough concealed to keep the single-location format from stagnating.
Put simply, they’re complex yet accessible people, utterly realistic in their neuroses and insecurities even as the barbed dialogue flirts with stylization. Their face-off scales dense principles of sexual theory down to the human level, demonstrating the primal, knotty gratification enjoyed by both sides of this tricky equation. Underneath all the textual flip-flopping about realness and fakeness, all the pop-psych theories on fetishistic self-abnegation, and all the mind games, there lies a deceptively sweet love story. In the end, that’s all anyone’s looking for, whether they go searching in a cathedral or dungeon. The deprivation is the point, but along with his sublimely spiky actors, Wigon illustrates how frightening, overwhelming, and nourishing it can be to stop the withholding — to allow yourself the pleasure of giving and receiving, and to see the liberation in submission. [B+]
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