There will be no kink shaming here. For the Puritans in the crowd, a kink is a person’s personal sexual fetish. For movie history, kinks are usually played to elicit horror or drama, like a famous Shining scene or pretty much the plot of Elle. There’s certainly horror and drama in Sanctuary, but the hyper specific kinks portrayed in this movie merely get us to those moments, not the acts themselves. Good, that means maybe we’re back on our way to casually dropping lines like this in movies for a bit of light humor in our sex scenes again.
We open in a pretty non descript nice hotel room inhabited by Hal (Christopher Abbott). A knock at the door brings in Rebecca (Margaret Qualley). At first, it seems like Hal is going through a business transition meeting with an HR rep. However, the questions quickly become VERY personal, and it becomes clear this is part of a regular routine Hal goes through with Rebecca to make himself sexually aroused.
While there are sexual acts in this movie, it’s the words that make Hal hard. The Micha Bloomberg screenplay is the audience turn on here. The first 20ish minute mini scene sets the tone immediately. We’re inside someone’s sexual kink, which blurs the lines between reality and fiction. That off-kilter dialogue and role playing is confusing and exciting, especially when it ends, and Hal and Rebecca just start having a dinner together, really f*cking with your head. From there, Bloomberg’s script is divided into 3 to 4 more mini scenes, where those blurred lines get even blurrier and wierder, as Hal and Rebecca flow between role playing and real life to the point where even the characters have no idea what is serious and what isn’t. The dialogue goes from dramatic, to darkly funny, to benign, to horrific, to almost violent jarringly at times, but it all fits together because of that opening tone setting scene.
The script needs two well partnered actors to pull of its weirdness, and it found two great ones. Since Girls, Christopher Abbott has been the king of playing these outwardly forceful but inwardly fragile men. That duality serves him well here, as he plays his game of wills with Margaret Qualley. Qualley is at her best playing these lurid but mysterious femme fatales; she would have been an amazing Hitchcock lead. In Sanctuary, Qualley has to make the audience feel like she always has the upper hand between her and Christopher Abbott, even when she knows she probably doesn’t. More importantly, she has to make Abbott and the audience believe Rebecca’s interest in Hal is more than just money, or else the movie falls apart. Thankfully, Qualley’s got some great acting reps, and was ready for the challenge. Together the pair are electric, completely disarming and screwing with the audience as they f*uck with each other in every possible meaning of that term.
While the physical act of sex can feel amazing, most people forget how important words and dialogue are to that process. Sanctuary doesn’t, and proceeds to give us not what we want but what it presumes we actually need. That might be horrifying to some out there, but to me, it’s refreshingly honest and maybe even a bit sweet. I mean, when you put aside some of the movie’s pyschosexual manipulation and perversion. You know, sweet.