Atom Egoyan’s Calendar is what happens when a filmmaker stares into a void for too long and decides the void might make an interesting movie. Spoiler: it doesn’t. What we have here is not a film so much as an experimental hostage situation—one in which time, emotion, and narrative coherence are blindfolded and marched off a cliff. If Speaking Partswas Egoyan’s moody break-up text, then Calendar is the drunk voicemail he left at 3 a.m., filmed on location in Armenia and edited with scissors stolen from a depressive art student.
Released in 1993, Calendar is the kind of movie that gets shown in university film classes when the professor wants to thin the herd. You walk in with hopes, dreams, maybe a sandwich. You walk out questioning whether cinema was a mistake.
The “story,” and we’re using that term as generously as possible, follows a nameless photographer played by Egoyan himself—a man so emotionally distant he makes HAL 9000 look like Tony Robbins. He travels to Armenia to photograph ancient churches for a calendar. Yes, you read that correctly: this is a movie about a man taking pictures of buildings for a calendar. That’s the hook. That’s the drama. Buckle up.
He’s joined by his wife (played by Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s eternal screen partner and the patron saint of whispered existential crises), who acts as his interpreter. They’re accompanied by an Armenian tour guide with a mustache and the emotional gravity of a stone wall. And while the photographer snaps pictures with all the passion of a DMV clerk, the guide and the wife begin to share a little spark—like two candles flickering in the basement of a mausoleum.
The photographer notices. He broods. He sulks. He points his camera. He says nothing. Repeat for 75 minutes.
What passes for plot unfolds via repetition: each of the 12 churches visited becomes a scene, like chapters in a romance novel written by an agoraphobic monk. We’re shown the original footage of the churches, the subtle interpersonal tensions, the wife and the guide bonding over Armenian history, and then cut to the present-day photographer back in Toronto, calling a series of escorts for dinner while running a passive-aggressive PowerPoint presentation of his emotional failures.
Each dinner scene with a different woman is filmed exactly the same: same table, same monologue, same wine bottle. The only difference is the woman—a rotating cast of confused actresses pretending they aren’t trapped in the saddest version of Groundhog Day ever made. He pours the wine, talks at them, then walks away mid-meal like a guy who just realized he forgot to ruin something else. It’s less about human connection and more like watching a man do emotional tax returns for a relationship he refused to audit in real time.
The repetition is meant to evoke the cyclical nature of grief, loss, memory, and emotional repression. What it actually evokes is the desire to chew glass just to feel something.
There’s no real character arc—just emotional entropy. The wife, who starts as a passive observer of Armenian ruins, blossoms emotionally through her connection to the homeland. She rediscovers culture, history, humanity. The photographer, meanwhile, just stares harder. He’s like a discount Antonioni protagonist with none of the mystery and all of the constipation. Egoyan the actor makes Egoyan the director look like Egoyan the funeral home mannequin.
And then there’s the voiceover. Oh god, the voiceover. It drips with so much self-importance, you’d think it was narrating the last transmission from a dying satellite. Every sentence sounds like it should end with “…and that’s why I can never love again.” It’s the audio equivalent of watching a man smoke a cigarette in the rain while remembering a time he almost felt something, once, near a tree.
Technically, the film is bare-bones. The camera is static. The lighting is naturalistic in the same way your uncle’s garage is “naturalistic.” Egoyan’s signature obsession with technology and mediation is here, but it’s filtered through VHS textures and the haunting click of a 35mm shutter that somehow feels more judgmental than poetic. If you’re allergic to slow pans and unblinking medium shots, this movie will leave you in hives.
Symbolism is splattered everywhere like cheap perfume. The calendar itself becomes a metaphor for memory, structure, futility—pick your poison. The churches represent cultural identity and permanence, while the failed marriage represents emotional exile. But instead of being layered and profound, it plays out like an MFA student’s fever dream after reading too much Roland Barthes and not enough actual storytelling.
And yet, despite all this supposed depth, the film is cold. Not “meditative” cold. Not “clinical” cold. Just cold. Calendardoesn’t invite the audience in—it leaves them shivering outside, nose pressed against the glass, while Egoyan reads his old love letters aloud to a houseplant.
There is no climax, no confrontation, no reconciliation. There is only the photographer, alone, his failed relationship preserved forever in analog stasis, like a cockroach under glass. The message is clear: memory is pain, art is distance, and love is best understood as something that happens off-screen to people who aren’t you.
So what are we left with?
Twelve churches. A broken marriage. One calendar. Zero emotional catharsis.
Watching Calendar is like watching a screensaver mourn its user. It’s inert, repetitive, and aggressively joyless. Egoyan tries to build a meditation on love and cultural identity but instead creates a slow-motion slideshow of passive aggression and architectural despair. This is cinema as quiet punishment. The kind of movie that makes you question whether time actually exists—or if you’ve simply been trapped inside a malfunctioning VHS tape for all eternity.
Final verdict? Calendar is a film for people who thought The Seventh Seal had too many jokes. It’s beautifully empty, poetically pointless, and intellectually exhausting. Watch it only if you’ve recently been dumped by a cartographer or if you’re writing a dissertation on how to make sadness boring. Otherwise, stick to actual calendars—they at least tell you when the nightmare will end.