Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002) is a film about the Armenian Genocide—or at least that’s what the press kit insists. What it’s actually about is harder to say. It might be about denial, identity, intergenerational trauma, filmmaking, customs agents, art history, editing software, or the overwhelming power of Charles Aznavour’s eyebrows. Or maybe it’s just about Egoyan needing someone—anyone—to tell him, “Buddy, maybe this is two movies. Or five.”
On paper, Ararat sounds noble. It wants to explore a horrifying historical event that’s still politically volatile today: the massacre of over a million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I. It wants to tell the story of a genocide, and how that trauma echoes through generations. What it delivers instead is a painfully confused meta-film about making a movie about the genocide, starring characters you neither know nor care about, discussing themes they never fully explore, while you, the viewer, sit there like a hostage at a very sad university lecture titled “Narrative Layering and Emotional Numbness.”
The movie opens with what appears to be a historical epic—a film-within-a-film about the genocide, full of sweeping music, dusty villages, and tormented Armenians clutching family heirlooms and looking skyward in despair. But don’t get comfortable. Because this isn’t really the movie. It’s just a movie being made inside the movie, which is itself interrupted repeatedly by modern-day scenes where actors, editors, and customs agents explain what the real movie is actually about. Which, spoiler: still unclear.
The supposed protagonist—if you can call him that—is Raffi (David Alpay), a Canadian-Armenian art student who’s been to Turkey (or maybe not?) to photograph Mount Ararat (which may or may not matter) and is now being interrogated by a customs agent named David (Christopher Plummer), who is apparently using border security as a form of grief counseling. Over the course of their airport sit-down, Raffi recounts his life, his mother, his trauma, his obsession with a film about genocide, and his confusing sexual tension with a woman he may or may not be related to. Meanwhile, David drops bits of exposition while looking like he wishes he were playing a Bond villain instead.
Raffi’s mother is Ani (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife and frequent muse), an art historian who lectures about Arshile Gorky and the fluidity of truth with the emotional intensity of a malfunctioning audiobook. Her job is to connect Gorky’s paintings to the themes of trauma and memory, but she ends up serving as the film’s philosophical fog machine—blasting abstract metaphors across every scene like she’s been paid by the riddle.
And then there’s Martin Harcourt (Brent Carver), the gay film director making the genocide movie inside the movie, who seems more invested in dramatic slow-motion shots than in historical accuracy. He spends most of his time rearranging suffering into digestible film sequences, which could be an interesting commentary on how cinema frames atrocity—if the movie around him weren’t already eating itself in a spiral of narrative collapse.
Egoyan doesn’t so much interweave timelines and themes as he aggressively crosshatches them with the precision of a caffeinated raccoon. Scenes jump between Raffi’s therapy customs interrogation, Ani’s art lectures, the film shoot, flashbacks to Raffi’s half-sister’s suicide, dream sequences, real historical atrocities, and post-production meetings. Each one ends just when it starts to become engaging, replaced by another non sequitur of somber exposition or someone quietly breaking down while looking at an old photograph in the rain.
The emotional throughline is buried beneath so much structural gimmickry that any real connection to the genocide itself is lost. You get fragments of horror: dead bodies, bullet-ridden walls, families torn apart—but they’re framed like museum exhibits, sterile and aestheticized. Egoyan seems more interested in how to depict tragedy than in the tragedy itself. It’s cinematic navel-gazing dressed as historical reckoning.
The performances range from earnest to exhausted. Alpay as Raffi looks permanently dazed, like a man who just woke up from a three-week nap and isn’t sure if he’s in a film or a student documentary about cultural guilt. Khanjian, as usual, speaks in capital-letter Themes, but with such a flat delivery you’d swear she was reading IKEA assembly instructions translated from Armenian. Plummer gives the film its only pulse, but his entire arc seems designed to teach Raffi a lesson about truth and narrative by…searching his luggage?
Cinematographically, it’s handsome. Egoyan and his crew know how to make a film look good. There are lovely, haunting shots of Mount Ararat, Turkish landscapes, and shadowy interiors where people whisper about genocide while holding back tears. But it’s all for nothing if the story—and the viewer—is lost in a blizzard of edits and concepts.
And let’s talk about the ending. Wait—which ending? The historical ending? The meta-film ending? The customs officer’s emotional breakthrough? The Gorky painting reveal? The sequence with the VHS tapes? By the time Ararat finishes, you feel less moved and more spiritually jetlagged. You’ve visited 14 plotlines and resolved none of them. You’ve sat through lectures, therapy sessions, monologues, reenactments, and artistic statements so heavy-handed they could be used to club a museum curator.
There’s no doubt that Egoyan’s intentions are good. He’s trying to process an atrocity that has been denied, buried, and ignored. He wants to explore how memory works—how history is preserved, distorted, and passed down. But in trying to say everything, he ends up saying very little. It’s not emotionally resonant. It’s structurally exhausting. It’s a two-hour art installation disguised as a drama, and you will leave it knowing more about narrative theory than the Armenian Genocide.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 disoriented customs interrogations.
Watch it if you enjoy being lectured by a film that constantly interrupts itself to clarify what it might be about. Everyone else: read a history book. It’ll be shorter, clearer, and 100% less likely to feature art historians whispering about pain while staring longingly at a mountain.