Walk All Over Me (2007): The Celluloid Dungeon

Walk All Over Me is a 2007 Canadian comedy/crime thriller.

Alberta, a young woman, flees a drug deal gone wrong in her small town. She arrives in Vancouver with only the clothes on her back and seeks out the only person she knows: her old babysitter, Celene.

Celene now works as a pro dominatrix, part of her “life plan” to become an actress. She reluctantly takes Alberta in. 

Alberta finds work as a supermarket clerk, but is drawn to the glamour of Celene’s work. While trying on one of Celene’s outfits, she spills coffee on it. Celene’s jealous house slave, Spencer, tricks her into ruining the outfit. 

Looking for money to replace Celene’s outfit, Alberta intercepts one of the video tapes from a prospective client and claims to be Celene. She meets the client, Paul, and despite her awkwardness and inexperience, they have a fun time. 

Paul persuades Alberta to go back to his place. Their date is interrupted by a trio of gangsters, Rene and his goons, looking for the money Paul stole. In the confrontation, Alberta grabs the money and flees. 

What follows is mostly a “who’s got the MacGuffin” crime thriller/comedy, driven by Alberta’s many bad decisions. We get no exploration of Celene or Spencer’s characters, or how kink figures into their lives. Alberta flirts with the idea of being a domme, by wearing Celene’s outfits, and she enjoys her time with Paul. There’s no mention if she wants to continue this. 

If there’s a theme to Walk, it’s the image of authority, and how to create it and see through it. At first, Renee is presented as a criminal mastermind in total control of his goon, but Alberta and Celene dismantle that. He’s revealed as sentimental, vain and unable to recognize betrayal right under his nose. Alberta gains in confidence by projecting authority as she saw Celene do. 

There’s a slight resemblance to the Wachowskis’ lesbian-noir thriller Bound, with two women up against a group of mobsters. The difference is, in Bound, Corky and Violet being lesbians puts a novel spin on the noir/thriller format. Because of lesbian cultural invisibility, the mobsters don’t even realize what’s going on. The question of whether Corky, a butch lesbian, can trust Violet, a femme bisexual, adds another layer of tension. 

In Walk, Celene working as a dominatrix doesn’t tie into the thriller plot, or her relationship with Alberta. She could have been a vanilla escort, or in some other line of work. All the kink elements do is add some sex appeal to the project.