The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
Since I go to the movies every week, Sanctuary provided a valuable service in my life by giving me something other than the remake of The Little Mermaid to see in this particular week. I had somewhat resigned myself to seeing the latest entry in Disney’s trend of self-desecration before this little curiosity appeared on the schedule of my local theater. I had never heard of this movie before I saw a trailer for it in front of Hypnotic (another movie that nobody went to see) and I was intrigued by the premise. Unfortunately, the film never quite lives up to the premise offered by the trailer, but, hey, I didn’t go to see The Little Mermaid in a theater. So that’s something.
I want to note that this movie may have the most half-assed plot summary that I have ever seen on IMDB. The entire one-sentence description reads as follows: “The heir to a hotel empire and the dominatrix who has primed him for success battle it out in a hotel room as he tries to end their relationship.” That’s accurate, sure, but still the shortest plot summary that I have ever seen on that site for a new movie. To give a bit more detail, the film follows an executive (played by Christopher Abbott) that has been regularly seeing a dominatrix (played by Margaret Qualley). When he is on the verge of being promoted to CEO, he decides to stop seeing her because he doesn’t think that their relationship would be viewed fondly by the company’s board of directors. She doesn’t take this well and starts playing various mind games, including potential black mail, to force him to continue seeing her.
That is a solid setup for a thriller and the film has a claustrophobic and intimate quality to it that is reminiscent of Hitchcock films like Rope and Dial M for Murder (both of which are among my favorites). Like those films from the master of suspense, Sanctuary feels like a stage play. There is one setting and two characters. That’s it. We are left to follow these two, the executive and the dominatrix, as they engage in psychological warfare and try to either end or continue their relationship in a way that they can both agree upon. It’s a tight and well-shot film that makes the dominatrix’s apartment almost seem like the third character in the drama. The elements are all here for a great movie, like something Hitchcock would make today now that he would be allowed to tackle such material. However, it never quite lives up to any of that.
BDSM is a topic that’s rarely addressed by mainstream movies, let alone a movie playing at my local mall theater, so I give Sanctuary some credit for tackling it. However, it’s also a very watered-down and tame take on the material that never allows the film to feel genuine or go anywhere particularly engaging. I’m sure that part of this is the desire for an R-rating, which is particularly limiting with subject matter like this. The dominatrix is strictly hands-off and humiliation-based, meaning that she never touches him and their sessions amount to verbal humiliation and instructions to do humiliating things (like clean the toilet). This is further enforced by the fact that her apartment contains zero BDSM equipment and not even her clothes imply anything kinky. It is, therefore, one of the most vanilla films that one could possibly make about this topic.
However, the film also has several fundamental misunderstandings in this arena that are more distracting than the tameness of it all. The two characters are not in a dom/sub romantic relationship; he is strictly a paying client with specific requests. She is clearly serving a very particular clientele of wealthy men, even though no other clients are ever mentioned. Therefore, her response of betrayal when he says that he is going to stop seeing her feels completely disingenuous and even unprofessional. That’s just not how that works. She should simply say goodbye and then await her next client. The way Sanctuary plays out shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how these things work and transforms a paid dominatrix into a smitten, short-term girlfriend that responds to a breakup with unwarranted rage.
The resulting dynamic doesn’t make contextual sense and the film becomes a psychological battle between two genuinely unsympathetic people. The BDSM context is largely lost because it doesn’t make much sense and Sanctuary largely just feels like an account of a particularly brutal breakup between people that really need to grow the fuck up. The level of pettiness on display is more akin to teenagers than two financially-successful adults (let alone one that was being paid by the other to be there) and, by the end, I really didn’t want to spend any more time with either of them. If this is how they end paid relationships, I would hate to see how they get along with their actual exes.
All that being said, there are positives here. This certainly isn’t a boring film and the performances are strong even if the characters are betrayed by the screenwriters limited understanding of the material. Margaret Qualley can be both sexy and intimidating as hell and Christopher Abbott pulls off the exhausted weakness of a man whose day job requires that he show constant strength. They have good chemistry together and the cat-and-mouse suspense is often effective, even if it is still a bit nonsensical. Honestly, this film would work better if they were simply in a romantic relationship and the film abandoned the dominatrix angle, as that would retain the dynamics without the extra baggage that amounts to very little.
Sanctuary is an above-average adult thriller that bites off a bit more than it can chew. While the concept is the film’s biggest selling point, it’s also the film’s biggest weakness because the filmmakers are never quite able to incorporate it in a believable way. If you want to kill a couple of hours with a slightly-above-average thriller that’s about a shade more flavorful than vanilla, then give it a shot.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_(2022_film)#/media/File:Sanctuary_poster.jpg
