The movie asks us to concede that our interior bulkheads fail, that city stories in which nothing happens can be fascinating. But the burden of proof will have to be borne by someone else.

An improbably plotted story about a sex surrogate whose lonely New York life is unpredictably upended when she forms a relationship with a client. The director, Anja Marquardt, may not convince you narratively, but scene to scene, she and her star, Brooke Bloom, keep you watching and wondering.

She’s Lost Control raises a lot of genuinely thought-provoking questions, and Marquardt’s austere style allows us to draw our own conclusions from what she presents on screen. That makes it even more of a shame that Marquardt doesn’t entirely trust her own material and feels a need to puff up her film with relatively artificial conflict that generally come off as sops to screenwriting conventions.

It’s rare in cinema that a woman who rejects monogamous marriage as an ideal isn’t punished. German director Anja Marquardt’s debut feature She’s Lost Control, which played here in the Forum section, condemns a sexual surrogate – a prostitute who works with a psychotherapist to help men overcome intimacy issues – through the same old cause-and-effect formula.