TIFF: The heir to a hotel empire (Christopher Abbott) is blackmailed by his dominatrix in Zachary Wiggon’s small but lively second film.
Spicy, silly and maddeningly romantic saga about a hotel chain heir (Christopher Abbott) who is being blackmailed by his longtime dominatrix (Margaret Qualley), Zachary Wigona “Sanctuary” unfolds as a strange cross between “Punch-Drunk Love” and an off-Broadway play. The results are delightful and irritating in almost equal measure, until a final-minute Hail Mary ends the film on such a high that even the grayer areas seem worth the walk in retrospect.
It opens with swirls of color and a haunting score by Ariel Marks that sounds like it could be the overture to a musical; ends with a rush of blood to the head. Meanwhile, he is supported by his performances. Not only the ineffectual performances of two of the most popular young actors of their time, but also their characters, both so engrossed in their roles in life that their strange role-playing together became a lifeline that neither of them could live without. At a certain point, who they pretend to be with each other may be more honest than who they are on their own.
Sanctuary is a story about identity and control, but it’s also a film about the fiery energy that comes from putting two beautiful people in a confined space and watching them fight for sexual dominance. More convoluted than convoluted, Mickey Bloomberg’s script begins on a modest note when a “lawyer” named Rebecca (Qually) arrives at a posh suite upstairs at the Porterfield Hotel in Denver, where her “client” Hal Porterfield (Abbott) is awaiting a hearing. . it must be completed before he can take control of his late father’s empire.
But several things seem to be in the situation. First, Hal claims to be 6’3″ tall and 200 pounds, obvious exaggerations that clash with the self-loathing and meekness of his lean demeanor. Rebecca, meanwhile, seems too young to be handling a case of this importance, and while great lawyers exist in the wild, they don’t tend to show up in someone’s hotel room with a blond wig worthy of an emerald green pantsuit and a humiliating resume that interrogates their client’s sexual history. Soon the masks are off and a half-naked Hal is scrubbing dirt off the marble floor of his dad’s bathroom while his mistress reads him for the dirt he is.
But there seems to be something wrong with this, at least simply. Rebecca constantly deviates from the script that Hal has written for them, as if she is trying to establish the same control over her client in real life that he exerted over her in their role play. While a less insightful version of this film might have been concerned with hiding the “truth” about Hal and Rebecca’s arrangement, “Sanctuary” ditches the parlor games and rug-pulling of the early stages to shift the focus to the slippery dynamics behind this. If the question of authenticity vs. performance is predictably central to the final two acts of Bloomberg’s script, it is dealt with not in the context of whether Hal and Rebecca are lying to each other, but in the context of why they are lying to themselves.
Acting is everything in Sanctuary, and (almost) everything is acting. Even more so than most two-handers, this is a film that thrives on its cast, and Abbott and Qualley are up to the task. Both are inspired choices. Abbott, because the role of the whiny Roman Roy belies his natural sense of aggression – creating a rich dissonance between Hal’s pitiful helplessness and the character’s knotty sense of control – and Qualley for the same reasons she’s always great, mainly the way she mixes childish frailty and vulnerability with a crazed aura of danger to the point that Hal isn’t sure if he should trust Rebecca with his life or call the police on her. Or both, one way or another.
It’s a part that requires some extreme (and I do mean extreme) swings in emotion, most of which only work because Quelli makes Rebecca feel invincible and powerless at the same time. At certain points, the relationship between her and Hal gets physical—at times disturbingly so—but the heart of Quelli’s performance can be found in the close-up reaction shots where you see her character process the situation in real time. We don’t know if she plans to destroy Hal or shame him into becoming the man he was always meant to be (whatever that means!), but Sanctuary gets so much of its rather innocent charm from the fun of trying to figure it out.
At least Wigan, whose only previous film was 2014’s similarly large-scale (and similarly poignant) The Heart Machine , always seems to have a clear understanding of what makes Rebecca tick. He and cinematographer Ludovico Isidori first shoot the character as if she’s straight out of a giallo movie – all sharp angles and velvety edges, as if she was designed by the same people who furnished the lavishly upholstered set in which 99% of this film takes place (a refreshing change pace compared to most of the over-control pandemic rates that have been done so far). The tight camera captures the scripted precision of Hal and Rebecca’s little charade in the first third of the film, before it loosens up so much midway through the film that it looks like she’s dancing with the cast. It’s no secret that almost every scene in Sanctuary takes place within the confines of a hotel room, but Wigan frames the space dynamically enough that the film learns the first lesson from a book Hal’s father wrote about business: “You have to match your insides with your outsides.”
It’s a lesson Hal himself has struggled with for so long that he’s come to miss the forest for the trees, leaving Rebecca as the only force in his life capable of restoring any measure of perspective. When she diagnoses him, he “wants to be reprimanded for what he sees as inherent flaws and then rewarded for complying,” but the solution to this problem eludes them both.
This leads to a lot of vamping during the film’s eventful but somewhat emptyly chaotic second act, during which Rebecca goes into goblin mode and tries to burn everything down so that the Sanctuary has something to build again as it strives for a brief but satisfying finale. which elevates the film and its characters. Some might find those last few beats too neat, but I couldn’t help but smile at how forcefully they put the real “perversions” of the story to bed. Their methods may be unconventional, but they are not irrational (or even unusual) people. As Rebecca tells Hal, “I just want what I deserve compared to what you have.” Who among us has ever asked for anything else? What makes “Sanctuary” such a raunchy, snack-sized piece of entertainment is that it asserts that some people have more to give than they might know if it weren’t for the person who took it away from them.
Grade: B
Sanctuary premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution in the US.
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