96 min | R | May 19, 2023 | Neon
A man hires a professional dominatrix to test him through a punishing ritual the night before he inherits his dead father’s hotel empire. She decides she wants a cut. What starts as a session becomes a negotiation neither one can walk away from.
Hal Porterfield is about to become the CEO of a hotel chain his father built. The night before the announcement, he runs a private ritual with Rebecca Marin, the dominatrix who has coached him for months. He tells her the arrangement is over. She does not accept that. Sanctuary traps two people in a single hotel suite and turns a contract dispute into a war over who actually made whom.
Margaret Qualley plays Rebecca with calculation that never tips into villainy. She shifts from servant to predator to wounded partner inside single conversations, and she sells every turn. Christopher Abbott plays Hal as a man whose confidence is borrowed and whose panic is real. He starts the night believing he holds all the power. Abbott lets you watch that belief drain out of him line by line. The two actors pass control back and forth so many times that the floor never stops moving.
Zachary Wigon directs the entire film inside one suite and refuses to let the location feel small. The camera circles the room and reframes the same furniture until the space itself becomes a chessboard. Micah Bloomberg’s script weaponizes role-play, because every threat could be a bluff and every confession could be a tactic. Ariel Marx’s score pushes the comedy toward menace and then pulls it back. The production design dresses the suite like a stage set, all hard surfaces and watching mirrors.
This is a film about how desire and money braid together until you cannot separate them. Rebecca and Hal each insist the other one needs them more. The genius of the construction is that both of them are right. Wigon keeps the stakes contained to one room and one night and proves he needs nothing else.