Steven Schuder’s lens is like a sharp scalpel, cutting open the self-destruction and redemption desire of modern people. Maggie Runhall plays Li, and the knife marks on her arms are the external development of spiritual ruins, while James Spader’s lawyer Gray is a grim creator with a rule ruler. The typewriter sound in the office, the revised manuscript annotated in red ink, and the leather-bound legal classics constitute the laboratory of this power and desire experiment.
The most subtle thing in the film is to deconstruct SM into a mirror game of the soul: Li gains a sense of order in humiliating instructions, and those harsh instructions that require “copying documents with her left hand until she bleeds” have become her anchor points against chaos; Generate’s rage when Gray tore up the documents and his panic when he was rewarded revealed his incompetence in intimate relationship under the strong mask. When Li finally put the pen tip on Gray’s Adam’s apple and smiled, this continuous role-playing suddenly turned into an equal soul dialogue-two people who used trauma as armor finally touched each other’s truth in the gap of pain.
Those scenes that are misread as eroticism are actually the process of spiritual innovation: Li exchanges the pain of the body for the real feeling of existence, and Gray escapes the emotional out of control in his desire for control. When the enter key of the typewriter becomes the metronome of desire, and the red ink is dizzy like a wound on the document, what the audience sees is not depravity, but two broken souls complete self-sewing in a deformed way.