My final movie of the 2023 Wisconsin Film Festival was Sanctuary. Billed as a "psychosexual thrill ride" and a thriller, I expected...Well, I'm not sure what I expected. Maybe something along the lines of Basic Instinct but less Joe Eszterhausy.
It concerns Hal (Christopher Abbott), the scion of the Porterfield family. The patriarch, Hal's father, made his fortune in the hotel business and, having passed on, has left a fortune to Hal as well as control of the family company as he is to assume the position of CEO. The movie implies that some daddy issues have made Hal into the submissive type and he has hired a dominatrix named Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) to help him fulfill his sexual fantasies wherein he is a slave ordered around and, well, dominated, by her.
However, on the cusp of assuming the control of the Porterfield hotel empire, Hal decides to stop using Rebecca's services and dedicate himself to his CEO duties instead of being ordered to clean his bathroom before being allowed to masturbate.
Rebecca doesn't appreciate being relieved of her duties and decides to blackmail Hal by threatening to send footage from their sessions to various people including Hal's family. This goes over like a lead balloon with him, as you might expect.
But this isn't just some BDSM type of relationship a la Secretary. Rebecca and Hal's verbal sparring is the highlight of the movie. At times, Martha and George from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? came to mind with their intensity threatening to career into altercations. When things are set to simmer, they can resemble Walter and Hildy from His Girl Friday, though the humor here is much darker.
Qualley and Abbott deserve heaps of praise for their dueling via words. The timing is great here and they both bring an intensity to their roles that radiates off of the screen. Venomous stares lead to threats both implied and explicit. Violence always seems right around the corner as the pair trade barbs and power dynamics shift.
But it wore on me. There is visceral excitement when these interlocutors enter the ring but the movie eventually became a one trick pony. For one thing, Hal was a pathetic figure for most of the time and that turns me off. He was pitiful and his dumb questions lost their humor value fairly quickly for me. While he eventually sheds his submissiveness for a spell, I got tired of watching him allowing himself to be walked on. Another element was the cinematography. I appreciated that the vast majority of the movie is spent in Hal's suite with only the occasional detour out into the hallway and in an elevator. And while one can certainly do worse than be forced to look at Qualley's pulchritudinous visage, too many shots are closeups of the actors' faces. I found myself wanting the camera to pull back to show us where Hal and Rebecca are in relation to one another in space instead of more shot-reverse shots of their faces. I wished we could have seen them move towards and away from one another more as well as showing us more body language rather than a surfeit of disembodied faces.
Again, Qualley and Abbott gave great performances but I felt let down by the direction and cinematography.
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