97 min | R | June 17, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures
A repressed widow hires a young sex worker in a hotel room and arrives with a checklist of things she has never done. He arrives with patience and a fake name. The transaction turns into the most honest conversation either of them has had in years.
Nancy Stokes is a retired religious-education teacher, recently widowed, who has never had satisfying sex and never had an orgasm. She books a hotel room and hires a younger sex worker named Leo Grande to fix that. The film stays in that room across several meetings and watches the negotiation shift from a service rendered to a reckoning with shame, age, and a body Nancy has spent her life apologizing for. Sophie Hyde directs a two-hander that uses the bedroom as a confessional. The real subject is not sex. It is permission.
Emma Thompson plays Nancy as a woman armored in manners and self-deprecation. She turns nervous politeness into a weapon she points at herself. Thompson lets the cruelty leak out, the way Nancy judges other women and her own children to avoid judging herself. Daryl McCormack plays Leo with a warmth that reads as professional until it does not. He holds eye contact and keeps his voice level while Nancy flinches and deflects, and McCormack makes the listening itself feel like the performance. The two actors trade control back and forth, and the moment Nancy probes Leo’s real life is where his composure cracks.
Hyde shoots Katy Brand’s script with a deliberate refusal to flatter. The camera stays close in the single hotel room and lets long takes run so the silences land. The production design keeps the space neutral and slightly corporate, a blank box that throws the actors’ faces into relief. The most exposed shot in the film is a mirror Nancy faces alone, and the staging makes her stillness do the work that dialogue cannot. Brand’s writing gives Nancy the funniest lines and then makes those jokes curdle into self-loathing, so the comedy and the wound share the same sentence.
The film commits to the bottle-episode structure and earns it. By keeping the walls close, Hyde forces every revelation to come from the people instead of the plot. Nancy’s journey is not toward better sex. It is toward looking at herself without contempt. The film ends on that look and trusts the audience to understand what it costs her.