Allure

A woman sits up and inhales. This is the first thing we see in Allure, the fea­ture debut of broth­ers Car­los and Jason Sanchez, pre­vi­ous­ly best known for their work in pho­tog­ra­phy. ​“What the hell’s wrong with you, you crazy bitch!” a man tells the woman, after they have had dis­en­gaged, vio­lent inter­course that puts her very much on top and leaves him feel­ing exploit­ed and emasculated.

Allure may open with a sex scene, but it is defi­ant­ly unsexy: mechan­i­cal, angry, abu­sive, and end­ing abrupt­ly in the frus­tra­tion of both par­tic­i­pants. The woman is 30-year-old Lau­ra (Evan Rachel Wood), a house clean­er work­ing for the com­pa­ny owned by William (Denis O’Hare). When we first meet William, he seems to be an old ex of hers – but we soon learn that he is actu­al­ly her father, anx­ious­ly indulging her destruc­tive sex­u­al behav­iours with co-work­ers and oth­ers out of famil­ial oblig­a­tion. ​“Any­one else would be fired for this,” he says – but he keeps her on, and keeps an eye on her.

Mean­while, Lau­ra is drawn to 16-year-old Eva (Julie Sarah Stone), who is deeply unhap­py that she must move in with the new boyfriend of her cos­set­ing moth­er (whose house Lau­ra cleans). ​“You don’t have to let your moth­er make your deci­sions for you, or con­trol your life,” Lau­ra reas­sures Eva, with an irony that will only grad­u­al­ly become appar­ent, and so she encour­ages Eva to move in with her instead, with­out telling any­one. As police search for Eva, Lau­ra shifts from being cool big sis­ter to con­trol­ling moth­er – with an inap­pro­pri­ate sex­u­al ele­ment com­ing between the women as well – and Eva finds her­self a pris­on­er, phys­i­cal­ly but also psychologically.

Allure is the sto­ry of an abu­sive rela­tion­ship (or of two, actu­al­ly). For as we watch Lau­ra manip­u­lat­ing, gaslight­ing and emo­tion­al­ly black­mail­ing her con­fused and sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced young ward, it is clear that this is a replay of Laura’s own trau­mat­ic loss of inno­cence. If Lau­ra, in all her iso­la­tion and con­flict­ed need­i­ness, becomes ​‘sug­ar mama’ to Eva, she also has a sug­ar dad­dy who is giv­ing her employ­ment and accom­mo­da­tion both to assuage his own guilt and to keep her close.

Shot by Sara Mishara in (most­ly) long shots and sub­dued colours, Allure adopts a cer­tain clin­i­cal dis­tance from its three main char­ac­ters which some­how – para­dox­i­cal­ly – both eschews moral judge­ment and invites sym­pa­thy. Every­one here is caught in the tox­ic dam­age of some­one else’s des­per­a­tion, and although the film is for the most part rig­or­ous­ly real­ist in its pre­sen­ta­tion, occa­sion­al shots of some­one (it is too dark to tell who exact­ly) sink­ing and drown­ing in liq­uid shift the film’s themes of emo­tion­al suf­fo­ca­tion to the realm of metaphor.

Allure sets itself up to be an erot­ic thriller, but is all the bet­ter for avoid­ing cheap bun­ny boil­er tropes, and instead focus­ing on char­ac­ter. Though hard­ly new, the notion that nobody abus­es like a vic­tim is here inten­si­fied by breath-tak­ing per­for­mances all-round.