Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-

Sanctuary wants you to think it’s sexy, provocative and clever, and it is none of those things. Everything that happens in it is preposterous. All I could think about, through its entire, tedious 96-minute run time was that no person in either of these characters’ positions would ever actually do or say the same things.

Here’s what it does have going or it. The two leads—indeed literally the only two characters ever seen onscreen, with the brief exception of a couple of extra walking through a hotel hallway—have chemistry with each other, and onscreen charisma. Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott, as a hired dominatrix and an ascending multimillionaire CEO, make the most of some truly subpar material. Within that context, though, Abbott in particular is well cast: he has a face made for a character who gets off on being humiliated.

This film is an odd specimen in that it both feels like a “covid movie,” being a two-hander with only two onscreen speaking parts and is entirely set inside a hotel room (with occasional forays into the hallway and the elevator outside of it), while simultaneously feeling like it could have been made any time, with this concept as its gimmick. It was a gimmick that wore thin with me very quickly.

Hal’s about to become CEO of his late father’s company, which owns and runs the chain of hotels this one is a part of. He’s been hiring Rebecca to come and humiliate him in one of the rooms, using memorized lines from a full script he wrote for them, for an unspecified but long time. Writing out entire scripts with lines they both memorize sure seems like a lot of effort for a climax in which Hal just jerks off sitting on a bathroom floor next to a toilet. To each his own, I guess. I’m not kink shaming! It’s just the first kink I’ve run across that involves the kind of work that is indistinguishable from mounting an Off Broadway play, albeit a dirtier one.

Hal has decided that his ascension to CEO means he must end his professional relationship with Rebecca. In response Rebecca decides to up the stakes of everything that is and has been going on between them.

Is Rebecca just expanding the limits of their sexual games? Is Hal actually indistinguishable from the doormat part he’s playing? Is Rebecca telling the truth with her threats of blackmail? Is Hal really this easily manipulated? Are these two actually in love? A better writer might have been able to make me care about the answers to any of these questions.

I can tell you this much: as soon as there was any suggestion that Rebecca might have real feelings for him—is she telling the truth? is she actually just still manipulating him, as he suspects?—even in the absence of a definitive answer, I decided Sanctuary had crossed over into the realm of total bullshit. Nothing these two said to each other ever rang true, even when we were meant to believe they were playing mind games with each other.

Sanctuary wants us to think it has a novel approach to gender dynamics, and it just doesn’t. Hal is broken and weak, Rebecca is bold with hints of insecurity. How revolutionary! I suppose we are meant to wonder whether the entire movie was just part of their “session,” and actually everything we saw was supposed to be as contrived as it seemed, all of it multiple layers of ways for Hal to get off. The movie just isn’t interesting enough to maintain that premise as a compelling idea.

*What a disappointment when the games e play aren’t any fun.*

Overall: C+