Agency and Consent as Liberation One of the film’s most important contributions is its depiction of agency. Nancy’s decision to pay for sex is deliberate and self-directed; it is a choice made for herself, not an escape or a cry for validation. The film treats this choice with seriousness. Scenes where Nancy practices speech, negotiates limits, and articulates what she wants are central: pleasure becomes a competency that can be learned and requested, not a private shame to be suffered. This practical approach—learning how to ask, how to direct, how to receive—frames sexual empowerment as a civic competency of adulthood rather than a private failing.
Limitations and Criticisms No film is without limits. Some viewers might object that the film’s narrow focus leaves certain structural issues unexplored—poverty, the larger economy of sex work, and racial and class dynamics—beyond what is seen in Leo’s backstory. Others might wish for a more complex exploration of the emotional consequences for both parties beyond the film’s taut closure. Yet these absences can also be read as deliberate: the film’s ambition is intimate rather than sociological, a character study rather than a polemic.
Exploring Desire and Shame At the heart of the film is Nancy’s confrontation with a lifetime of internalized shame. Years of a dutiful marriage, a life devoted to others, and the silent hierarchies of respectability have left her inexperienced but intensely curious. Nancy’s anxieties—about her body, about ageing, and about whether pleasure is permissible at her stage of life—are rendered with honesty and humor. Emma Thompson’s performance makes Nancy both painfully specific and universally recognizable: a person who has been taught to equate worth with restraint. The film refuses titillation; instead, it frames sexual desire as human and deserving of dignity, dismantling the notion that erotic fulfillment is only for the young or the conventionally desirable.
Performance, Intimacy, and Economy of Form Hyde’s direction keeps the film intimate and restrained. Much of the movie consists of two characters in a hotel room, and this theatrical concentration gives the dialogue and gestures great weight. The camera favors faces and small movements; the mise-en-scène emphasizes ordinary domestic details that anchor the emotional stakes in reality. The film’s short runtime and focused scope are strengths: by refusing extraneous subplots, it allows emotional truth to accumulate in small, believable increments.
Thompson and McCormack form a quietly electric pair. Thompson brings humor, vulnerability, and a practiced theatricality that never tips into caricature; McCormack offers a calm, grounded counterpoint, a professional steadiness that humanizes a role often sensationalized onscreen. Their exchanges are the film’s engine—linguistically precise, alternately comic and tender, and attentive to the ethical contours of intimacy.