Sanctuary, and the Person Behind the Role

A man in a hotel suite is ordering room service when there is a knock at the door. The woman who comes in has a briefcase and a list of questions. She has been sent, she says, to assess whether he is fit to run the hotel company his father built, and the questions start as due diligence and drift somewhere else: into his habits, his body, the things a board would never ask. Within minutes it is clear that none of this is what it looks like. She is a professional dominatrix. The interview is a scene. He wrote it.

That is how Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary begins: two people, one suite, one night, and a title that turns out to be the word they agreed would stop everything. It is a thriller about power, and it has mostly been received as one, a contest over who is really in charge. This essay asks a plainer question, because the film is built on something most thrillers about power leave out: a deal. A script, a fee, a rule about touching, a safe word. What does an arrangement like that owe the person on the other side of it?

The answer offered here is not the one the film reaches. A paid arrangement does not owe the other person love, or a lifetime, or a share of anything. What it owes is smaller and harder: to leave them a person. Inside a scene a man may ask to be treated as a thing, and a woman may be paid to do it well. Behind each role, though, there has to go on being someone who can still say stop, still walk out, still end it, and whose work, body and secrets are not the other’s to take. That is what the rule and the word were for. Over one night, both of these people take it from each other, one obligation at a time.

This Library’s essay on a neighbouring film, “Babygirl, and the Difference Between Surrender and Leverage”, argued that a game of surrender played across a real hierarchy turns into mutual leverage, in which nobody can say stop for free. Sanctuary has no office and no board to keep its two people in their places; its lines of power are money and authorship, and the question here is not what it costs to stop but what each of them owed the other. The film’s own answer arrives in the morning; this essay will come to it after a warning, and will not agree with it.

Sanctuary was directed by Zachary Wigon from a screenplay by Micah Bloomberg. It is a film for two: Rebecca Marin, played by Margaret Qualley, and Hal Porterfield, played by Christopher Abbott. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022, and Neon released it in American cinemas in May 2023. It runs ninety-six minutes and was shot in New York in under three weeks. In Japan it is streamed under its English title, with the word in katakana beside it.

What follows gives the whole film, ending included. It also states a sexual assault, a threat to have someone killed, and a threat of murder and suicide. It names each of them and describes none.

The story, in outline. The interview turns personal, then humiliating, as his script requires, and he complains when she strays from it. She has him clean the bathroom in his underwear, then allows him to climax. Over dinner, out of character, he tells her that with his father dead he is taking over the company, and that their sessions have no place in his new life. He gives her an expensive watch as a parting present. She leaves, offended.

She comes back. Quoting his father’s book on management, she tells him he is unfit for the job and demands half his first year’s salary, four million dollars, or the recordings she has made of their sessions will go public. While she mocks him, he tears the suite apart looking for the camera, and accidentally gives himself an electric shock. From the floor he tells her that what they have is only a transaction, and that he could have her killed. At knifepoint, she forces sex on him, telling him that a child would bind them together for life.

He pays, then stops her at the lift and demands a guarantee that she will never come back for more. When she refuses, he drags her back inside; she shows him footage she has secretly kept; he ties her to the bed and orders her to delete it. Instead she tells him that he is her only client, and that she feels like herself only in their sessions. He says their safe word, sanctuary. She will not stop, because, she says, this is no longer a game. He threatens to kill her and then himself. She proposes a last scene in which she plays his dead father, and leads him to say that he is nothing like his father and does not have to be. They fall asleep holding each other.

In the morning, on his way to the ceremony at which his mother is to hand him the company, Hal proposes that Rebecca run it instead, with him at her side. She asks what he will tell his mother. That they are in love, he says. They kiss.

The film was not screened for this essay. What is described here comes from its published record, from reviews, and from interviews with the people who made it, each named where it is used. Lines of dialogue are paraphrased; words quoted from critics and makers are those the named sources print.

Start with the arrangement as it was before anyone broke it, because everything that happens afterwards is a list of its parts being taken away.

There was a script, and he wrote it. In Nick Schager’s account for The Daily Beast, it was a carefully choreographed play for two, meant to be followed to the letter. There was a fee, and he paid it; in Erin Brady’s review for /Film, he is the son of a dead billionaire and she barely gets by with her bills. There was a rule, and it was hers: in their sessions she is not touched. Her trade is words, command and ridicule, delivered by agreement. And there was a word, agreed between them, that would stop everything.

Each of those four things protected someone. The script protected him: what happened to him in that room was what he had asked for, down to the words. The fee protected her: what she gave him was work, priced and bounded, not a debt of feeling. The rule protected her body. The word protected him. Together they let two people go a long way into their roles because, behind the roles, each of them stayed a person with a say. As Brady put it, in paraphrase: in their scenes Rebecca holds the sexual power, but Hal sets the boundaries and pays her. A deal like that stays steady only while each of them remembers that the other half is real.

What Rebecca does in the first scene takes skill. She learns a text and plays it. She reads a man closely enough to know which sentence will land. She improvises where the text is thin. The humiliation he pays for is something she builds. Nothing in this is shameful, on either side. Wanting to be humiliated by agreement is not a symptom, and selling that performance is not a fall. It is a job with a craft, and the craft is the part of the arrangement he will find easiest to forget.

The film’s sharpest argument is about authorship. As Kurt Loder records the exchange in his review for Reason, Rebecca tells Hal that he owes her, because their sessions put some backbone into him. He answers that she taught him nothing: he wrote the scenes, and she only said the words. And she answers that the words were not what was going on.

Both of them are describing something real, and both descriptions serve the speaker. He is right that the arrangement was built to his specification. She is right that what happened in the room could not be reduced to his text: a scene is made by the person who performs it as much as by the person who wrote it, and when he complained that she strayed from the page he was complaining about her work. What neither of them says is that the arrangement was two people’s. His script was paper until she played it. Her performance had no occasion without his desire. The fee did not make one of them the owner and the other the equipment. It made them parties to something.

Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy, a British film of 2014, shows the same architecture with no money in it at all. Two women who are lovers repeat a ritual of mistress and maid every day, and it gradually becomes clear that the one who serves is its author: Evelyn writes the scenes and the lines, and Cynthia performs them to please her. Then, on Evelyn’s birthday, Cynthia takes a scene somewhere Evelyn does not want to go. Evelyn says her safe word, and Cynthia ignores it.

Two films, eight years apart, put a refused safe word in the same hands: those of the partner who has been performing the other’s script. This essay does not think that is a coincidence, or an excuse. A script someone else writes and you perform is labour, and labour that nobody names as labour has to go somewhere; in both films it breaks out at the one moment it may not, when the author says stop. What The Duke of Burgundy does next, Sanctuary never does: it treats the ignored word as a wound. Cynthia breaks character in the next scene and cries, Evelyn comforts her, the written instructions are burned, and only then does the ritual begin again. Sanctuary turns its refused word into the start of its last act, and its morning never looks back at it.

Go back to the dinner, where the first obligation fails, quietly and with good manners.

Hal has every right to end the arrangement, and what follows is not a complaint that he left. A client may stop being a client. Wanting to become someone new is not a wrong, and neither is fearing what a board would make of his private life. If anything in this film deserves sympathy without reservation, it is a man trying, clumsily, to grow into a chair his father filled and never let him forget.

What he gets wrong is the how. He ends it with a speech and a present. The watch, which reviewers price at about thirty-two thousand dollars, is generous, and it is exactly wrong. A payment says: this was work, and this is what it was worth. A present at the end of paid work says that the work was a kindness done for him, which he is now in a position to reward. In Schager’s account she mocks it as the sort of thing a policeman gets at his retirement party, and it is a precise insult. She has been retired, by a speech, from a job she did not know she could lose, by a man who decided alone that the arrangement was his to close.

Before weighing anything she does next, see what she has lost at that table. The film withholds it until late: he is her only client. So the man across the table is not giving up a pastime. He is ending her income, the only venue her work has, and, as she will tell him hours later, the only hours in which she feels like herself. None of this entitles her to what follows. All of it is a reason, and a reason deserves to be understood before it is weighed.

Most people know a small version of that table. Anyone who has tried to end a long paid relationship that had become personal, with a hairdresser of ten years, a piano teacher, the woman who helped look after a parent, knows how hard it is to find the way out, and how tempting a present is, because a present lets you leave feeling generous. The person on the other side usually knows the difference. What a paid arrangement owes at its end is not a reason and not a gift. It is to be ended as something two people did: said to her face, with time to answer, and with the work called work.

She comes back with a number: four million dollars. Before seeing what the figure does, see what it claims: a share. Her case, as several reviews record it, is that she made him fit for the job, and that the man the company is about to put in charge was partly built in rooms like this one. That is a claim for credit, and it is not absurd. The work was real.

What the demand does is another matter. She attaches it to recordings of their sessions, made, it turns out, without his knowledge, and threatens to make them public. That is blackmail, and it breaks the obligation this deal depended on more than any other. Discretion was not a courtesy here. It was the ground the arrangement stood on: he could hand her his humiliation only because it would stay in the room. By recording him in secret she turned the one thing he had entrusted to her into material, and by threatening to publish it she turned him from a party into a hostage. Whatever she was owed, it could not be collected like that.

Then comes the film’s farce, which is also its first real violence: the suite torn apart for a camera, an accidental shock, and, from the floor, the sentence the whole film is built to test. It is only a transaction, he tells her; there is no feeling in it, and he could have her killed.

Listen to the two halves of that together. The first says she is owed nothing beyond the fee. The second says she is owed nothing at all, not even her life. The word only is how he makes a threat to kill sound like bookkeeping.

People use that word about arrangements far gentler than this one, and it is nearly always wrong. A transaction is not the relationship in which nothing is owed. It is the relationship in which what is owed is spelled out. Two strangers who agree a price, a time, a task and a limit have made more explicit promises to each other in ten minutes than many couples make in ten years. The promises run both ways, and they do not end at the money. The person who pays owes the fee, and also the terms: her rule about touch, her time, her work acknowledged as work. The person who is paid owes the performance, and also the limits: his word, his privacy, his right to end it. Money settles one line of that account. It settles nothing else.

This Library’s essay “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and the Permission to Want” found the same line from the other side of a different hotel room. Money, it argued, did not make that encounter false; it made the obligations unequal, and what the client had bought was time, attention and an agreed frame, not access to the life of the man she was paying. Sanctuary runs that finding in both directions. Hal treats Rebecca as though the fee had bought her whole working life and could be closed with a tip. Rebecca treats Hal as though her work had bought her a claim on his future and his body. Each of them decides that the person on the other side of the deal was never quite a person.

The word only is what people say just before they take something the deal never gave them.

What happens next has to be named exactly. At knifepoint, Rebecca forces sex on Hal. That is sexual assault. It is sexual assault whoever does it to whomever, and it is not made smaller because the person it is done to is a man, or the client, or someone who has spent the evening being humiliated by agreement. A game in which he consented to be humiliated does not contain a scene in which he is forced. The consent was to the game. The knife ends the game.

She tells him that a child would bind them together for life. So the assault is also an attempt to take a second decision from him: whether, and with whom, to become a parent. Both decisions were his. The knife took both.

There are two ways of not seeing this scene, and both can be found in writing about the film. The first reads it as mutual. Shortly before the knife, the film has her remark on his body’s response, and at least one online explainer of the ending reads him as enjoying it, and takes the moment the knife is put down as proof. A few sentences later the same account says that he had no other option. The second sentence is the true one, and it cancels the first. A body’s response is not consent, in a man exactly as in a woman. A knife is not a question, and nothing a body does in front of one is an answer.

The second way is not to see it at all. Adam Nayman’s thoughtful review in The Ringer, which sets Sanctuary beside Lars von Trier’s far bleaker Antichrist, notes in a parenthesis that Sanctuary does not “feature sexual violence”. It does. The phrase is worth quoting not to embarrass a critic but because it shows how easily this scene slips past: a woman, a man, a game of humiliation already under way, a film that plays much of its night for laughs. There are old ideas about who can be forced and who cannot, and they are strong enough to hide a knife.

One more thing belongs here: the arrangement’s own logic, turned inside out. The rule that protected her body in their sessions was that nobody touched it. At knifepoint she does to him the one thing that rule existed to keep out of the room. In the terms of their own arrangement, it is the moment its last protection is gone.

The film does not come back to it. This essay does, because a story that goes on to call the night love has made the question impossible to leave alone.

At the lift, when she will not promise never to come back for more, he drags her back into the suite. That is force too, and it gets the same plain words: she was leaving, and he took the leaving away. From here the coercion runs in both directions.

Then, after he has tied her to the bed, the film arrives at its title. He says the safe word, the one that was supposed to stop everything. She will not stop. This is no longer a game, she says.

Consent in an arrangement like theirs is not a mood in the room. It is operational, and the safe word is where it lives. It is the one term that outranks every other term: whatever the script says, whatever was paid, whatever either of them wants, the word ends it. That is why it is agreed before anything begins, and why it is not open to negotiation in the middle. The safe word is the consent. Whatever goes on after it has been said is not a scene any more.

Which is why her reason is exactly backwards. No longer a game does not release anyone from the word. It is the condition in which the word matters most. If this is no longer a game, then nothing either of them is doing has any agreement behind it at all, and the only thing that can follow is stopping. She has not stepped outside the rules into something more real. She has stepped outside the only thing that made any of it permissible.

This Library’s essay “A Veto Is Not Autonomy. The Other Half Is a Yes That Can Stop.” argued that the no which shows what an arrangement is made of is not the one said at the door but the one said in the middle, once something has started and stopping will cost the other person something. Sanctuary’s safe word is that no. And “Wanting to Surrender Control Does Not Mean Giving Up Choice” warned that a safe word said in a second language, under stress, may not work as one. The film shows the failure no choice of language can prevent. His word is said clearly, in the language they share, and it is heard, and refused. A safe word solves the problem of being misunderstood. It cannot solve the problem of being understood and ignored.

Then the worst of the night: he threatens to kill her and then himself. What brings them back is not the word but a scene, the one in which she plays his dead father. It is the film’s strangest turn and its most revealing: after every rule has gone, what brings two people back from the edge is a role, entered by agreement, in which something true can finally be said. Offered under a threat of death, it is closer to rescue than to consent; but it is the best evidence in the film that the frame was never the problem.

So to the morning, and a kiss at the lift where, the night before, he stopped her leaving.

The film means this as a happy ending, or at least as one that could be. Christopher Abbott told W Magazine that it was a love story, “a fun, rom-com, popcorn movie” about two people who are in love and do not know it. Zachary Wigon told Film Daze that he had gone looking for a “hidden tunnel” between the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s and the erotic thriller, and he declined to fix a meaning for the ending, for fear of closing it off. Those intentions deserve to be taken at their word. They also explain the trouble.

Screwball comedy has a contract with its audience. Its lovers insult, trick and exhaust each other, and the cruelty may be funny because nobody is really hurt: what looks like damage is courtship. Sanctuary breaks that promise in the middle of its night, with a knife, a refused safe word and a threat to kill, and then takes the genre’s ending anyway, as though the promise had been kept. Reviewers felt the join. Schager allowed that the resolution may not seem “wholly believable”, and Alisha Mughal, who interviewed Wigon for Film Daze and admired the film, called its romantic close “obliquely jarring” after all the violence the two of them had thrown at each other.

This essay reads the ending more severely. The morning does not undo the night. The sexual assault is still a sexual assault; the threats are still threats; the refused word is still refused. A kiss is not an account of any of it, and a story that ends in love has not thereby shown that what came before was love’s price. People discover that they love each other without a knife every day. A film that asks its audience to read harm as the hard road to intimacy teaches something about harm that is worth refusing, however charming the film.

Look at what the morning settles. Hal offers Rebecca what the arrangement never promised her, his whole company, and says what a transaction never owed, that this is love. The debts that were owed, and broken, go unmentioned: his privacy, her rule, his body, her leaving, the word. The ending pays lavishly, in a currency nobody asked for, and leaves the real account unpaid.

It is also a new arrangement. There is a script, and he writes it. There is a fee, now a salary. There are roles, chief executive and consort, and a line prepared for his mother. Everything the old arrangement had is there, enlarged, except one thing. Nobody mentions a word that would end it.

Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman, in 1990, closed its romance on a sex worker telling the rich man who had hired her for the week that she would rescue him right back. Sanctuary’s morning reads like that line turned into an organisation chart. The fairy tale here is not that he rescues her from the work, but that the work was the romance all along, and that its proper reward is his company. That is a fantasy about money too.

Most reviewers singled out Margaret Qualley’s performance, and the praise is earned: she makes a woman whose trade is being believed into someone the audience can never quite read. The film gives her its first scene, a portrait of competence, and the better half of the argument about whose work it was.

What it does not give her is anywhere else to be. The film is a two-hander in the strictest sense: no other client, no friend, no life outside the suite, which is itself a room in one of his family’s hotels. That is a good formal choice for a thriller. It is also, exactly, her situation: she feels like herself only in their sessions, and the film’s form cannot imagine her anywhere else either.

Critics noticed the older pattern underneath. Hannah Strong, writing for Little White Lies, wished the script had looked harder at Rebecca’s job and her reasons for doing it, and observed that in places it echoes clichéd views of sex work: that its natural end point is romance, and that the women who do it are schemers out to trap their clients for money. Sanctuary uses both, one after the other. For most of the night Rebecca is the schemer with the tape. In the morning she is the bride of the firm.

And the ending’s generosity has a catch. Her talent is finally given a boardroom, but the boardroom is his to give. The film cannot picture her command becoming legitimate except by folding it into his inheritance. It is a promotion, and it is also a capture. Which of the two the film intends, it does not say, and its director has chosen not to say either.

None of this is a reason to pity her, and she would not thank anyone for it. She is the most capable person in the film, and she knows it. The point is narrower. A film that respects a sex worker’s craft in its first scene has, by its last, found no future for her that is not his.

A reader in Japan meets the knife scene beside a piece of recent legal history. For a hundred and ten years, from the Penal Code of 1907 until July 2017, the offence the law called rape recognised only women as its victims; the National Police Agency’s account of the change says so in as many words. A revision enacted in June 2017 and in force from 13 July renamed the offence and made the victim’s sex irrelevant. Until then, in the vocabulary of the law, a man could not be raped.

Since July 2023 the law has gone further. The Ministry of Justice explains that the essence of a sexual offence is a sexual act done in a state in which free decision was difficult, and the current offences are framed around a state in which it is difficult to form, to express, or to carry through the will not to consent. Those three verbs describe a safe word more exactly than most writing about kink: it is a way of expressing that will, agreed in advance so that it cannot be mistaken, and the difficulty of carrying the will through is the failure Sanctuary puts on screen, a no that was formed, and said, and heard, and not honoured.

A separate law, passed alongside that reform, made secret recordings a crime of their own: since July 2023, filming a person’s sexual state in secret without a legitimate reason has been an offence, and so has handing the recording to others. The ministry describes what it protects as the right not to have one’s sexual self seen by others, at another time, against one’s will. That is the discretion the arrangement in the film depended on, described by a state that no longer treats its breach as a private matter.

In the Cabinet Office’s survey for fiscal 2023, 8.1 per cent of women and 0.7 per cent of men said they had experienced sexual intercourse without their consent. The men who said so were ten, in a sample of more than thirteen hundred: too few to read as a pattern, enough to hear as voices. Among the circumstances they gave were being threatened, and being unable to refuse because of who the other person was. Of everyone who had experienced it, women and men together, more than half had told no one.

For anyone to whom a scene like this is not fiction: the national number #8891 connects free of charge to the nearest one-stop support centre for sexual crime and sexual violence. The centres are not only for women, and several prefectures list lines specifically for men. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page Mamorouyo Kokoro lists free lines for people who have had thoughts of dying, some of them open around the clock; on one of them, the Yorisoi Hotline, callers can choose support in foreign languages.

None of this is applied to the film’s characters, who are fictional and live under another country’s laws. It is described because it shows how the law here has come to frame a stop, a recording, and a man as someone who can be forced.

Four objections deserve a hearing. The first is the makers’ own: this is a screwball erotic thriller, meant to be fun, and an essay that audits it for obligations is reading a dream as a contract. Much of that should be granted. A film may be cruel and funny at once, and a viewer who enjoyed this one has nothing to correct. But the film chose its own title, the one term in the arrangement that is supposed to be absolute, and built its last act on that term being refused. It asked the question this essay is asking. The essay only declines its answer.

The second is the film’s own deepest claim. Perhaps the frame was a cage: these two could be honest only inside a game, and the night, terrible as it was, was the price of getting out. The feeling may be real, and the film believes it is. This essay refuses only the step from feeling to justification. If a frame has grown too small for what two people have found inside it, the way out is to say so and make a new one together. Breaking it with a hidden camera, a knife and a threat to kill leads only into a worse cage.

The third is aimed at the thesis: is being treated as a thing not the whole point of some scenes? It is, and this essay agrees. But the man cleaning the bathroom in the first scene is also the author holding the word that ends it. The argument is not against being made an object by consent. It is against the moment the person behind the role disappears.

The fourth comes from two sides at once, and it is the one that partly lands. One side says this essay is harder on Rebecca than on Hal, who also used force, tied her down and twice threatened her life; the other, that it is too easy on her, because it lets a sexual assault share a page with his threats. The essay has named every act, his and hers, in the same plain words, and declines to weigh them against each other. It gives the assault a section of its own because it is the act most easily not seen. Whether that is fairness or only the look of it, a reader is entitled to judge.

This house sells private companionship. That makes it an interested party to everything above, and the interest should be stated before anything else: it would suit this house for a reader to conclude that a well-kept frame is enough to make a paid arrangement safe.

The film is not evidence of that. It is not evidence of the opposite either. It is a two-hander built for reversals, not a study of professional domination or of sex work as anyone practises them, and reviewers noticed how much of it runs on old clichés. It says nothing about what this house sells. It does not show that paid arrangements end in violence. And it does not show that frames keep anyone safe: in the film, the frame protected two people only for as long as both of them kept it, and a frame kept by a house is no different, because it is kept, or not, by people.

So this house does not offer itself as the better version of anything in this film. The most it can honestly do is accept that the questions this essay has put to Hal and Rebecca are questions any paid arrangement has to answer, its own included, and that no house can certify its own answers from the inside.

And nothing these two people needed was for sale. What would have saved their night was a word honoured, a recording never made, and an ending said to someone’s face. None of it costs anything, and none of it can be bought.

It is cultural criticism. It diagnoses no one. Hal and Rebecca are fictional, and dominant and submissive are roles in an arrangement, not clinical categories. It treats kink as a legitimate practice and professional domination as work, and it is not a verdict on either, or on the many people who practise negotiated power exchange with care.

Where published accounts of a scene differ, it reports only what they share, and it describes the electric shock as the sources do, as an accident.

Nothing in it is legal advice. It says nothing about the private lives of anyone who made or acted in the film, and nothing in it implies that any of them knows of this house or endorses it.

A few questions, for anyone who recognised something in that suite.

Is there an arrangement in your life, paid or unpaid, that you have been calling only a transaction, and what would the other person say it owes? When something of yours ended, did it end as something two people did, or as a speech and a present? Is there a word, spoken or not, that is supposed to stop things between you and someone else, and do you believe it would work if you said it? Is anything of yours being kept, in a phone, a folder or someone’s memory, that could be used to hold you in place?

The film ends with two people who have broken every term they had, kissing inside a new arrangement with no way out written into it. This essay ends somewhere smaller. The measure of any arrangement, paid or not, is not how it feels on the good nights. It is what happens when one of you says stop.

You are allowed to end things, and to be ended well. You are allowed to be paid for your work without being told it was a favour. And the word that stops everything was always yours to say, and never anyone’s to refuse.