Brooke Bloom in She’s Lost Control (Visit Films)

Ronah works in what she calls “professional intimacy,” meeting with male psychology patients who have sustained issues with relationships, and she helps them become more comfortable with their sexuality. In her first full-length feature film, director Anja Marquardt examines what it means to be intimate in this contemporary moment, both in a sexual and vulnerable way.

While working on her MA in behavioral psychology, Ronah (Brooke Bloom) is simultaneously assisting a psychologist as a sex surrogate. Dr. Alan Cassidy (Dennis Boutsikaris) refers clients to her, and she’s currently seeing three. The latest is a troubled nurse anesthetist, Johnny (Homeland’s Marc Menchaca). He makes Ronah nervous at first, especially when he has a drink before his first session. He’s unable to connect with women on any level other than a one-night stand, and he spends most of his free time taking care of his ailing sister. Ronah gradually, though, develops feelings for him, despite his brooding attitude. The line between sex surrogacy, sex work, and her emotional needs become blurred as she develops feelings towards the extremely unsettled Johnny.

Simultaneously, Ronah is dealing with a lot at home. Her living situation is a mess. Her plumbing is causing leaks in the apartment below, and she keeps receiving phone calls from an unlisted number. Additionally, she also injects herself with hormones as part of the procedure to freeze her eggs. If all that isn’t enough, her brother informs her that their mother has disappeared.

The premise is intriguing as a character study of Ronah. Like her patients, she apparently is unable to sustain many emotional ties with those around her, including her brother and neighbors. Her only friend is a woman in a similar profession. By taking the initiative to freeze her eggs, Ronah is clearly doubtful that an intimate relationship of her own is a part of her future.

With her other patients, she enjoys helping them, and she’s good at it. Bloom plays her with a nervous charm, but the audience is never quite allowed to understand Ronah completely. Snippets of her story are presented so subtly it’s difficult to piece her life together. It’s challenging to connect her apartment fiasco and her preparedness for motherhood with her occupation. It does, on some level, make sense that Ronah falls for Johnny; he’s unlike her other patients, who are shy. He’s a dangerous challenge for her, one that she accepts willingly and perhaps as a distraction from all that’s happening in her personal life. Menchaca’s Johnny is a much more powerful performance, which made me anxious every time he was on screen.

The ending left me a bit bewildered about what the takeaway should be. The issues surrounding Ronah’s occupation culminate in a way that detracts from the somewhat sex-positive tone at the beginning. Despite her ability to help these men, in perhaps unconventional ways, the film’s violent ending puts all that into question.