Sanc­tu­ary – first-look review

Break­ing up is hard to do, per 60s croon­er Neil Sedaka’s clas­sic song – Hal Porter­field (Christo­pher Abbott), pre­sump­tive heir to his father’s vast hotel for­tune, is about to dis­cov­er this as he attempts to end things with Rebec­ca (Mar­garet Qual­ley). The nature of their rela­tion­ship blurs the line between per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al; she’s a no-con­tact dom­i­na­trix who spe­cialis­es in ver­bal humil­i­a­tion, and has been pro­vid­ing her ser­vices to Hal for a lengthy amount of time.

But with Hal’s father recent­ly deceased, it’s time for him to ascend to the throne, and Porter­field Jr recog­nis­es the optics of being involved in a com­plex sit­u­a­tion­ship with a sex work­er might not be the best. He’s arranged one final tête-a-tête, in the plush suite of his father’s Den­ver hotel where they usu­al­ly meet. But Rebec­ca hasn’t been play­ing this game only to lose the final hand. When Hal attempts to fob her off with a fan­cy watch and a hand­shake, she thinks she deserves a lit­tle more compensation.

Zachary Wigon’s sopho­more fea­ture – writ­ten by Mic­ah Bloomberg – is a cham­ber piece for two, as Hal and Rebec­ca vie for the upper hand with bit­ter barbs and flir­ta­tious exchanges, mak­ing it con­sis­tent­ly dif­fi­cult to tell who is prey and who is preda­tor. In the age of sex­less cin­e­ma we’re cur­rent­ly liv­ing through, it’s refresh­ing to see well-matched leads in film which doesn’t shy away from inti­ma­cy, though the script could per­haps delve more into the nature of Rebecca’s job and her moti­va­tion for doing it, and does in places echo more cliché views of sex work (ie. that its nat­ur­al end point is romance, and that the women who do sex work are shrewish schemers look­ing to trap their clients for finan­cial gain).

Despite the imper­fec­tions with­in Bloomberg’s screen­play, Abbott and Qual­ley sell the hell out of it – they pos­sess an easy chem­istry that fluc­tu­ates between desire, des­per­a­tion and despisal. It’s the sec­ond time Abbott has starred in a film set in a hotel in which a blonde sex work­er gets the bet­ter of him, and while Pierc­ing was a more blood­thirsty affair, there’s plen­ty of psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare tak­ing place this time around.

As they ver­bal­ly spar the lines blur between fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty, with Rebec­ca and Hal both with­hold­ing the truth about their emo­tions and inten­tions. The game of cat and mouse that takes place with­in their hotel room is enough to keep the view­er guess­ing, with Qual­ley in par­tic­u­lar an intrigu­ing­ly with­hold­ing per­former, jux­ta­pos­ing her expres­sive­ness with hid­den moti­va­tions, while Abbott plays the pos­tur­ing rich kid with a meek side well. If any­thing, per­haps Sanc­tu­ary could stand to be a lit­tle bold­er with its por­tray­al of a mod­ern sub/​dom rela­tion­ship – Sec­re­tary this ain’t – but it’s a sleek, styl­ish romp all the same.