Sanctuary – Power, Desire and the Dark Dance of Control
When Sanctuary was premiered in 2022 at the Toronto International Film Fest, and subsequently, in 2023, the audiences were certain it was not just another thriller. Directed by Zachary Wigon and written by Micah Bloomberg, Sanctuary managed to turn a single-room set-up into an electric battleground of dominance and vulnerability. It is one of those rare films in which the tension is psychological, erotic, and philosophical all at once – a story of control that paradoxically reveals the fragility of control.
Sanctuary stars Margret Qualley and Christopher Abbott. Unlike conventional films, it does not rely on action or spectacle. It survives on dialogue, performance, and a power struggle that is so intimate it feels invasive. However, the mirror is the underlying human emotions of need, loss, and identity. As much as the characters, the performers were also at the edge of their own artistic limits.
A Room That Becomes a Mind
Much of this story takes place in a modern hotel suite. Hal (Christopher Abbott) is a wealthy heir to a hotel empire, and he thinks this visit will be a final “session.” Hal invites Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), a dominatrix, to spend more time with him. Something shifted in the relationship, and Rebecca has other goals and plans. What starts as a scripted roleplay quickly becomes a brutal psychological game in which each protagonist imbues a character the other and strikes with abandon. The game has deadly stakes, as there seems to be no true upper hand.
At first, Hal’s world is defined by privilege and arrogance. He wants to end his relationship with Rebecca cleanly, as if their years of sessions were just business and he is literally throwing Rebecca the cash. But as Rebecca confidently tears down his arrogance and flips his words back on him, the scenes begin to blur. The suite, and then the characters in it, with their mirrored walls and silence, expose the facets in their façades.
Zachary Wigon’s direction never allows the audience to perceive the room as static. The walls seem to tighten and constrict as the occupants engage with one another. In the hands of Ludovica Isidori, the cinematography uses different lenses and shallow depth of focus to suffocate the audience and make them participants in the game of mental chess being played. By the end of the film, the audience is unaware of the fact that the supposed “sanctuary” is actually devoid of all qualities of a sanctuary. The audience is forced to view the site of rebirth, of pain, and of reckoning, and is warranted a life-altering experience.
Margaret Qualley’s performance as Rebecca is magnetic in its duality, and yet the audience is never able to predict her next demeanor shift. The character of a dominatrix that Qualley plays in this film is a mix of overt manipulation tinged with sincerity, which is why to play the part, it required a level of confidence that teetered on fearless.
In her dual role as Rebecca and a Sanctuary performer, Qualley had unique challenges that she had to confront, particularly having played a shy character shortly before. She described her character as, “a type A personality who is always calm,” and observed that outside of her cinematic and interview performances, “that stillness is a part of Rebecca that is very social and hold[s] people together, yet she is a type A performer, and she is always calm and that is a part of a performance she is always putting on.” She revealed that she “embodied the character’s stillness, but she described how to perform and how people present a character of themselves that is very different in a situation.”
Because of her unique background, she did not have to think over her control physically, as she had been trained as a dancer. Her control was even more amplified, as she was guided to craft every “greek” element of her dance to mimic her control and precision in psychological dance. Decrescendos, slowed movements, and stillness focused the audience’s attention and let them “perform” through captivated imagination. She was a “slow, in control, and focused storm” as the crew described the performance.
The psychological tension of the film is made believable by Abbott’s unique ability to switch between fear, anger, and attraction.
Abbott is getting interesting roles. He has a filmography that displays characters with emotional fragility, such as in James White and Possessor. He has also expressed discontent with the prevalence of male dominance in Hollywood and the roles that he is offered. Sanctuary was the first time he was able to properly embody that philosophy.
Sanctuary forced him to explore both control and the more difficult opposite, vulnerability, on a number of different layers, including emotional and physical. During rehearsals, Abbott and Qualley advanced the text to align with their vision of the performance, which led them to refine it to a point of their own constructed authenticity. There was little improvisation allowed. Lines were treated like weapons and were repeated to the point of deadly precision, each one designed to advance their vision. Abbott was emotionally exhausted by some scenes and said it felt like he was “being stripped of your armor” which was precisely the emotional state Hal required in order to be believable.
Sanctuary has a sensual surface, with layers that explore the opposite of love, which is power. Rebecca and Hal’s relationship, while transactional, has a strange intimacy that they both will not acknowledge. Their sessions create a dependency that is both monetary and emotionally honest, which is a rare and valuable currency in both of their worlds.
In the film, each reversal — Rebecca ridicules Hal, Hal attempts to reclaim dominance, both confess what they really want — removes another layer of social pretense. The questions the film poses include: Is dominance merely a disguise for fear? Can submission be an act of liberation?
These themes were quickly identified by fans on the Internet. Reddit and Letterboxd discussion threads were filled with interpretations of the film, with some viewing it as a metaphor for class struggle, others for gender politics, and others for contemporary emotionally uneven relationships. The trailer generated significant discussion, particularly around the line, “You paid me to make you feel small,” which helped the film gain a lot of buzz well before its official release.
A Director’s Experiment in Constraint
Zachary Wigon had to sustain dramatic tension in a two-character story filmed in a single hotel room for 90 minutes. To keep up the interest without the aid of cutting and montage, he had to devise a strategy and execution to a level that one might expect in a stage production. “The hotel room is like a pressure cooker,” he explained. “You don’t cut away from it — you let the steam build.”
“All of the production design, the placement of the furniture, and the shifts of power and dominance were planned in advance.” A set of cues was defined in advance through lighting and the movement of the camera. The furniture was also strategically designed and placed to reinforce the power dynamics of each character. Hal was positioned above Rebecca in the scene so that he could sit in the furniture while commanding the scene and looking over her.
The production was planned so that most of the time was taken for the rehearsals. The shooting was so fast that the set was described by the crew as “claustrophobically intimate.” The crew maintained an eerie silence with a single-minded purpose. The tension of the set and the roles bled over. Qualley, who played Rebecca, had to leave the set for days to calm down from her character.
The Unwritten Agreement Between Performer and Spectator
Sanctuary succeeds because it relies on its audience to understand the unsaid. The film concerns power more than it does sex — the intricate social dance of worth assessment and the interplay of dominance, submission, and validation. And in some sense, that is what Qualley and Abbott were also engaged in—navigating the parameters of on-screen intimacy without crossing into the realm of exploitation. Their chemistry, and in part challenge, was the film’s focal point, provoking the audience to squirm, blush, and ponder. In this era, in which most thrillers depend on auditory and visual sensationalism, Sanctuary has the audacity to whisper. It suggests that the most perilous conflicts are not those that are physically engaged, but those that are verbal or emotional, manifested in the power of the unsaid. And perhaps that is the reason why it stays with us, because it is not only about who wins in that hotel room, but about who we are when we stop pretending to be in control.
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