The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is a 2023 American comedy written, directed, and starred in by Joanna Arnow, with Scott Cohen, Babak Tafti, Michael Cyril Creighton, and Alysia Reiner in the cast. Sean Baker is executive producer. It premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 19 May 2023, then went through festivals in Toronto, New York, and AFI, and opened in the United States on 26 April 2024. For viewers who know BDSM, it is a deadpan comedy of manners. Submission is relationship infrastructure, not a single tease. Ann, a thirty-three-year-old submissive, moves through casual D/s, aftercare conflict, workplace absurdity, and the difficulty of keeping a fetish self inside a “normal” relationship. The roleplay, humiliation, and aftercare are between adults. There are no minors.
Ann, Allen, and Elliot
Ann is thirty-three and in a long-term casual BDSM relationship with Allen, as his submissive. She is detached from an anonymous corporate job, from judgmental parents, and from Allen, a dom with little interest in her life outside the dynamic. Scott Cohen plays Allen as the classic low-effort casual dom, more a habit than a hot passion. At work she receives a one-year service award even though she has been there more than three years, and her manager assigns a project that would make her own job obsolete. She also meets Thomas, who scores children’s films. That relationship ends when he gets back with an ex.
Her sister’s marriage collapses over the husband’s infidelity, and the sister moves into the apartment. Ann’s manager is laid off. Ann is given new responsibilities and a title she does not want. Boss Karl (Michael Cyril Creighton) later starts micromanaging. She meets Elliot (Parish Bradley), a high-protocol humiliation specialist more invested in roleplay than the partners before him. He dresses her in a “fuckpig” costume and is more controlling and more demeaning. The intensity appeals at first. Then it snags: Elliot dislikes that she needs aftercare, and she gets bored of his public humiliation. The film treats aftercare as a compatibility deal, not decoration. When he fails that, the relationship cracks.
The sister’s involvement frustrates Ann. Once the sister realizes Ann is in a relationship, Ann tells her to move out. Ann tries going back to Allen. He does not recognize her at first because she changed her username on the site where they met. When she learns he is a Zionist she pulls away, then apologizes herself soon after. Politics and play collide in the same awkward register as the rest of her life. She takes a break from relationships and goes on vacation with highly critical parents. Her father plays guitar and sings. Her mother is sharp and picky. Friends help her build a dating profile on a non-fetish site.
A vanilla try, and the mess left open
A string of dates goes nowhere until she meets Chris (Babak Tafti). They bond over A League of Their Own and start seeing each other more seriously. Chris is the non-scene partner who might learn. Ann tries to bring BDSM in. He is uncomfortable at first, then willing to try domination and submission inside the relationship. She still falls back into the old habit and contacts Allen again, the man who remains uninterested in her life. She has trouble saying what she needs, because she is used to being ordered rather than asked how she feels.
Her life stays stalled. She spends more time with her parents, takes on more work, and frames a departing coworker’s photographs as a going-away gift. The same flat daily feeling runs through the wrong service award, the project that could kill her job, and a promotion she does not want. Her reaction to the company matches her reaction to fetish: flat, passive acceptance. By the end, the dynamic between Chris and Allen is blurry. The film does not say whether she is cheating on Chris, whether they broke up, or whether she is seeing the old dom with consent. The ethical mess of overlapping dynamics stays open. There is no punishment arc and no redemption arc, which fits choices she only half makes.
Bleak humor in the boring logistics
Arnow, as writer, director, and star, keeps the tone intimate and observational. The submissive’s inner flatness is the comic engine, not a parade of kink set pieces. On Rotten Tomatoes, 85 percent of 48 reviews were positive, with an average of 7.4/10. The site’s consensus says Arnow finds bleak humor in the struggle to connect. Metacritic gave it 77 out of 100 based on 16 critics, generally favorable.
For BDSM-media viewers, those reviews count because the film does not use kink as a shock or as redemption. Casual D/s, username logistics on a fetish site, the fuckpig costume, the aftercare conflict, and the awkward project of training a vanilla-leaning boyfriend sit in the same deadpan frame as corporate awards and a parent’s guitar. What it catches is the boredom and the logistics: a changed username, aftercare as a hard limit for one person and a need for the other, the mismatch between high-protocol humiliation and ordinary emotional presence, and how hard it is to turn “tell me what to do” into a relationship that expects two people to check in. Ann’s office life and her love life are full of the same unspoken compromise and the same stall.
