I think I had first heard about Sanctuary when it premiered at TIFF last year. I studiously marked it in my calendar for its streaming release knowing that I would be hamstrung by choices nine months previously that would prevent me from participating in a public viewing of this movie, and really, based on what I know now, I don’t think I would’ve wanted to see this movie with strangers anyway. I’m fresh off the heels of seeing Stan Sebastian charm his way around a date in the erotic thriller Fresh, which set high expectations. The duo Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and that one commercial that I show Wife whenever she’s in a bad mood) and Christopher Abbott (the boyfriend in HBO’s Girls and also the fellow fuck up in that buddy suicide comedy) are excellent in the trailer and it took me until about a week ago to recognize that this was also a single location movie, so in some ways it’d feel like a play, I guess?
Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) and Hal (Christopher Abbott) are caught in a moment of high drama as Hal finds himself in a moment of decision paralysis, on the eve of inheriting his father’s company. I’ve been going round and round on this movie for about three weeks and I have to say that I think it’s so perfectly constructed, the chemistry is exquisite and slow burn. In terms of thinking about the ways in which these two characters mirror and reflect the interactions of adults in their late twenties and early thirties who are in the midst of “erotic emplotment” as one college course puts it, there seems like no better metaphor than high end call girl with a creative flair and nervous man-child with a director complex. The multiplicity of kink and the ways in which they are employed so seemlessly and so intentionally in order to provoke emotion out of Hal are absolutely riveting.
Sanctuary delights in being meta, having its characters recite lines as we read them off the script book, the deviations, and then the return to form. There are a lot of moments that read like the movie is consciously mining kink tropes, loading the chamber and then spinning through permutations to fuck with Hal’s head, having Hal and the audience question what’s real and what’s play. Margaret Qualley has four registers to her voice, all of which are impossibly hot: I especially like the way she nods her head erratically like she’s encouraging Hal just a little too enthusiastically to arrive at the correct answer. The registers range from that steady, serious, officious, professional with a little bite to it; the nasal, high-pitch, diffident whine; the playful lilt; the scared, trembling, fumbling, nervous, caught off guard.
There aren’t that many movies that I can say I’ve watched and then watched again immediately after, but this is one of them. This is a socially acceptable guilty pleasure if I’ve ever seen one.
Spoiler: Just wanted to mention something clever about this movie poster–it’s impossible, which is fun. One of the first rules we learn about the way that the two interact is that they’re not allowed to touch, and yet here they’re in full contact, and her wig from the opening scene’s performance is on! Just a nice little bit of misdirection.
