Quartile rating: 7/10 · 2 ratings
Sanctuary is a two-hander chamber piece that lives and dies by its performances — Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott are genuinely exceptional, elevating what is essentially a single-location power-struggle into something electric and unpredictable. The novelty is real: a claustrophobic, darkly comic deconstruction of dominance, dependency, and class that feels wholly singular in conception and execution. The plot, while clever and tightly wound, occasionally strains under the weight of its own theatricality — the reversals can feel overly schematic on the page even as the actors sell them. The cinematography is functional and restrained almost to a fault; the hotel-room setting is used competently but not inventively, missing an opportunity to visually express the psychological intensity. The ending is satisfying but slightly ambiguous in a way that feels more like a writer's escape hatch than a fully earned resolution.