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Inside a luxurious, 45th-floor hotel suite, a young, blonde-haired lawyer visits the anxious heir to a hotel empire and begins a business meeting. Armed with a briefcase of documents, Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) runs Hal (Christopher Abbott) through a questionnaire as he prepares to take over his late father’s company. But the legal formalities take a hard pivot when Rebecca begins asking about his height, weight, and sexual history. It’s not long before she demands that he strip half-naked in the bathroom and scrub the back of the toilet, all while she watches from a chair, reveling in her client’s belittled efforts. Though she deviates a bit, Rebecca is just following the script that Hal has written, verbally sparring and embarrassing him without physical contact until she lets him masturbate and climax on the floor.
That’s how Sanctuary, a sly, sleek, sexy two-hander from director Zachary Wigon and writer Micah Bloomberg, starts its riveting dialectic about power, performance, and identity. When the charade ends (she removes her wig, he puts on his shirt), the pair gorges on some room-service dinner before Hal gifts her a $32,000 watch and informs his longtime dominatrix that he’ll no longer need her services. After years of enlisting Rebecca to act out his darkest psychological fantasies, he believes he must rid himself of any sordid liabilities ahead of owning his father’s business. “What we do is so meaningful,” he tells her. “But it’s just not something that goes with the next stage of my life.”
Initially puzzled, Rebecca ultimately agrees to end her professional relationship, but after pausing by the elevator, she gets an epiphany. Hal can’t get rid of her that quickly. After all, doesn’t he realize that without their regular sessions, he wouldn’t nearly have the same self-confidence to run his family’s company? When she returns to the suite, she demands he pay her more than the equivalent of a retirement gift. In fact, she believes she deserves half his salary. “I want what I’m worth, relative to what you have,” she says. “You’d be unfit without me.” Hal is perplexed by her sudden request. “What we do is fun, not real,” he argues. And yet, based on their history together and the way she makes him feel, he knows deep down that can’t be true.
“The characters themselves are sort of realizing things in real time,” Abbott tells ELLE.com on a Zoom call with his co-star Qualley. “There are these two people that play these roles with each other, and once things start getting real, they realize they’re this odd match.”
“Which is what all good relationships do,” Qualley jumps in. “You learn more about yourself through your partner.”
Over the course of Sanctuary’s 90-minute runtime, that learning process proves to be a volatile and playful negotiation, upending power and gender dynamics in the process. Throughout the night, Rebecca and Hal lie and deceive each other, hurl insults and play games, and blur the lines between instructive role-play and reality. Though Hal enjoys being submissive in his scripted fantasies, he wields his wealth to intimidate Rebecca when she claims she’s been secretly taping their sessions. But she has her own methods of manipulation, proving that his economic muscle is the result of her services. At various points throughout the movie, it’s hard to tell when someone has the upper hand, or who even has it at all. “I kind of feel like the big driving force for Rebecca is just loving him,” Qualley says. “She’ll use whatever it takes in order to get Hal.”
Because this symbiotic relationship centers two slippery and mercurial people, neither Abbot nor Qualley spent much time researching the dominatrix subculture. “I did less character work than I’d ever done,” Qualley says. But the script’s play-like structure and one-location setting became an intriguing feature-length acting exercise that challenged them every day on set (the movie was shot over 18 days inside a Brooklyn soundstage). “The best analogy is like walking onto a tennis court. The court is there, it’s made to play tennis on, and the game is going to change,” Abbott says. “We sort of trusted each other that if we’re going to take on a two-hander, you need to do it with someone where you feel like it’s going to be dynamic and surprising.”
Despite the theatrical setup, Wigon made sure to keep the banter cinematic, shooting his two leads inside the same few rooms with varied angles, close-ups, and styles. The decision let Qualley pop her monologues with an unpredictable verve (she sinks her claws into a sultry “Pledge of Allegiance” recital), and accented the moments when Abbott starts to break into rage, sometimes punctuated by camera tilts and turns. Much like Hal and Rebecca’s meticulous role playing script, Wigon choreographed the exact ways he wanted both actors to move in unison with their stacks of dialogue, which Qualley found liberating. “Because all my decisions were made—I was going to stand here while I said this, look here, and drag my finger, etcetera—the only thing I had to do was be present, listen to [Christopher], and get to play with however I’m saying things,” she says. “Sometimes, when you do have infinite options, it doesn’t feel like freedom, it feels debilitating.”
On first watch, it might be tempting to interpret Sanctuary as a dark and intense character study of psychotic people. But in ways reminiscent to watching the tonal ping-pong in HBO’s Succession, it’s more enjoyable—and ultimately more reasonable—to view Wigon’s movie as darkly comedic, a chaotic love story that just needs to get sorted out through sexually-coded charades and impressions. “The movie’s a lot sweeter than it might actually seem,” Qualley says. “I think it’s almost borderline wholesome.” Consider the way Hal feels emboldened (and engorged) while playing a submissive, mimicking Roman Roy’s beta male perversions on his climb up the corporate ladder. “When he’s having to submit,” Abbott says, “that’s when he’s at his most confident.” The same could be said for Rebecca, whose dom identity gives her a confidence she doesn’t get outside the walls of her relationship with Hal.
As Sanctuary sprints to its unexpected resolution, Rebecca reiterates a passage from Hal’s father’s book on business: “You have to match up your insides with your outsides.” The advice has eluded Hal for most of his life, but Rebecca seems like the only person who can get him to embrace the person he wants to be for himself. As Qualley notes, “We’re all kind of playing different roles in our lives all the time, and some of them are more authentic to who you really are than others, just based on how comfortable you are in any given situation.” Abbott agrees, noting the way that his profession—in this case, playing a role-player for three weeks in a confined, sweaty space—has only enhanced his self-awareness. “You inevitably learn something about yourself and how you interact with humans and how you’re forced to listen to one another,” he says. “When you’re putting on a mask and you’re able to hide behind something, you can be more of yourself in a lot of ways.”
Sanctuary is now playing in theaters.