Atom Egoyan’s Chloe is the kind of film that puts on lingerie, lights a candle, and then spends 90 minutes explaining its feelings while gently sobbing into a glass of Pinot Grigio. It wants to be sexy. It wants to be dangerous. It wants to be Fatal Attraction for people who use words like “problematize.” But what it delivers is a drab, over-lit softcore soap opera where everyone looks like they’re auditioning for a Cialis commercial but forgot the direction halfway through.
Released in 2009, Chloe is Egoyan’s most mainstream effort—a Hollywood remake of the French film Nathalie…, with a stacked cast including Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried. It’s got all the ingredients for a steamy, psychologically complex thriller: adultery, deception, bisexual longing, and dangerous obsession. But like a microwave dinner promising “restaurant quality,” what you get is pale, soggy, and sad.
Let’s start with the plot, which is basically “what if you hired a sex worker to test your husband’s fidelity and then made it weird?” Julianne Moore plays Catherine Stewart, a successful Toronto gynecologist and walking advertisement for cold lighting. She suspects her charming-but-distant husband David (Liam Neeson) might be cheating—because he’s always off giving lectures to young women, and also, he’s Liam Neeson. So instead of talking to him like a functional adult, Catherine hires Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), a high-end escort with Disney princess eyes and the emotional depth of a damp tissue, to seduce him and report back.
But Chloe, being the titular character and therefore contractually obligated to be “complicated,” doesn’t just report back. She spins a web of erotic fiction, seducing Catherine emotionally, sexually, and narratively. She weaves tales of trysts with David, planting detailed visions in Catherine’s already fragile mind. Catherine, naturally, spirals—and eventually spirals right into bed with Chloe. Because why not? In Egoyan’s world, human behavior follows the logic of dream journals and soft jazz.
Seyfried, to her credit, tries her damndest. She whispers, she stares, she pouts, and she floats through the movie like a haunted elf with boundary issues. But her performance is trapped between femme fatale and lost puppy. One minute she’s seducing with surgical precision; the next, she’s crying because someone didn’t love her enough. It’s erotic thriller whiplash, and it never lands. Chloe isn’t mysterious. She’s just deeply confused and emotionally clingy, like a stalker created in a lab by mixing equal parts Lana Del Rey and that girl you ghosted after one date.
Julianne Moore spends the entire film looking like she just woke up from a nap in a Restoration Hardware catalog. Her Catherine is tightly wound, emotionally repressed, and lit like a corpse about to be embalmed. You can feel Moore trying to dig into the character’s psychological messiness, but she’s given dialogue that sounds like it was ripped from a therapist’s voicemail: “Do you love me?” “What is desire?” “Are we even real?” It’s all mood and no movement—like watching someone slowly drown in a bathtub of ambiguity.
And then there’s Liam Neeson, who spends most of the movie looking mildly guilty and/or confused, like a man who agreed to do this film before reading the third act. His David is allegedly a charming philanderer, but Neeson plays him like a distracted uncle trying to remember where he parked. He’s barely in the movie, which is probably for the best. Every time he appears, he sucks the air out of the scene with the gravitational force of an accidental Zoom call.
Visually, Egoyan tries to make Toronto look sexy, which is like trying to make a filing cabinet look seductive. The interiors are sleek, cold, and weirdly reflective. Every room is full of mirrors, windows, or glass doors—because this is a film about voyeurism, you see. Get it? Everyone is watching everyone. Everyone has secrets. Everyone looks like they haven’t smiled since 1996.
The color palette is pure Egoyan: eggshell, beige, grayscale, and the occasional splash of bloodless red. It’s like eroticism drained of blood, filtered through a Restoration Hardware Instagram page. The sex scenes, meanwhile, feel like they were choreographed by an AI trained on 2003 Calvin Klein commercials. They’re not arousing so much as puzzling. Bodies touch, lips part, but the chemistry is somewhere between “bank merger” and “accidental hug at a funeral.”
And the suspense? Nonexistent. The twist, such as it is, involves Chloe’s unstable obsession becoming deadly, which you could see coming from the first time she blinked too slowly. There’s a lot of ominous music, dramatic pauses, and characters walking through hallways like they’re late for a tragic epiphany. By the time the climax arrives—pun fully intended—you’re emotionally exhausted and spiritually disengaged. The final confrontation, set in a glass house (because symbolism), is so over-the-top and underwritten that it plays like a rejected Lifetime movie directed by Lars von Trier on Xanax.
Egoyan, once known for subtle explorations of alienation and media, here plays dress-up in genre territory he clearly doesn’t respect. He wants the erotic tension of Eyes Wide Shut, the twisty thrills of Gone Girl, and the psychosexual punch of Basic Instinct—but he ends up with Lifetime After Dark: The Sad Gynecologist Chronicles. There’s no danger. No risk. Just long pauses and the quiet scream of people trapped in a plot too thin to support its own mascara budget.
Even the film’s themes—identity, control, the collapse of intimacy—are served up with such heavy-handed earnestness that they collapse under their own weight. It’s as if Egoyan was trying to write a dissertation on the female gaze while simultaneously directing a softcore remake of Single White Female on a snowed-in weekend in Ontario.
Final verdict? Chloe is what happens when a cerebral director tries to make an erotic thriller and ends up creating a cold, confused, whisper-soft tragedy about nothing. It’s not a movie. It’s a glass of milk left out in the snow. If you’re looking for thrills, skip this. If you’re looking for erotica, good lord, skip this. But if you’re looking to watch talented actors trapped in a lukewarm Canadian fever dream about emotional neglect and mirror angles… you’ve found your film. Just don’t expect it to finish.
