If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be emotionally waterboarded by a fax machine while trapped inside a RadioShack circa 1989, Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts has you covered. This is a film that stares deep into the hollow soul of modern relationships and comes back with nothing but static. It’s an existential tech-noir about disconnection, voyeurism, and people mumbling into telephones while looking vaguely haunted, as if their souls have been repossessed by Canadian public funding.
Released in 1989, Speaking Parts was Egoyan’s third feature—an early entry in his slow-burning catalog of emotionally paralyzed people in beige apartments doing absolutely nothing for long stretches of time while being filmed through curtains. This movie is no exception. It takes the idea of “show, don’t tell” and instead opts for “neither show nor tell—just mope.”
The plot, such as it is, revolves around Lance (Michael McManus), a hotel custodian and aspiring actor whose primary personality trait is that he exists. He doesn’t speak much, doesn’t emote much, and doesn’t seem to enjoy the few things that happen to him. You could replace him with a floor lamp wearing a leather jacket and nobody would notice. One of the film’s central themes is voicelessness—how people struggle to be heard, to be seen, to make a connection. Lance takes this literally by barely having any lines. He is, in the most literal and poetic sense, a void with cheekbones.
Lance cleans hotel rooms and occasionally rents them out to a side hustle involving softcore porn videos, all while trying to land a real acting role—something with speaking parts. The irony is so on-the-nose it might as well be tattooed on his forehead in Helvetica. His coworker Lisa (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife and eternal muse) is in love with him in the way only Egoyan characters can love: from a distance, silently, and with the passion of a dying spreadsheet. She obsessively rents every video Lance appears in, rewinding and watching the scenes like she’s decoding the Zapruder film of human emotion. It’s less romantic and more restraining-order adjacent.
The other major player is Clara (Gabrielle Rose), a TV screenwriter who casts Lance as the lead in her autobiographical teleplay. She sees something in his blank expression that screams “emotional cipher,” and to be fair, casting someone who feels nothing in a drama about trauma might be a stroke of genius—or a death sentence. Clara’s teleplay is a personal exorcism of grief over her brother’s death, but like everything else in this movie, it’s filtered through layers of distortion, bureaucracy, and corporate white noise. Watching Speaking Parts is like trying to cry while trapped inside a Best Buy demo reel.
Egoyan is obsessed with technology as both a conduit and a barrier to human connection, which is conceptually interesting if it weren’t executed with the dramatic urgency of a dial tone. Video monitors, intercoms, answering machines—they’re everywhere in this film, cold and blinking, recording sadness like it’s a warranty claim. The result is a parade of disembodied voices and ghostly images, none of which resolve into anything resembling tension, character development, or plot. It’s a movie about alienation that goes all-in on alienating the audience.
Let’s talk about the acting, if you can call it that. Michael McManus is a black hole in leather. His Lance doesn’t just lack charisma—he absorbs it from nearby objects. Arsinée Khanjian delivers her lines like she’s under hypnosis, and Gabrielle Rose gives the film’s only performance that feels vaguely connected to the world of the living. Everyone else behaves like they’ve been sedated by postmodernism.
The dialogue is sparse, which would be fine if the visuals picked up the slack, but Egoyan shoots the film like he’s allergic to momentum. Characters drift through sterile hallways, stand in rooms lit by flickering television sets, and stare longingly into CRT monitors like they’re waiting for someone to fax them a hug. There are no sweeping gestures, no explosive confrontations—just minor discomfort and a persistent hum of dread, like the feeling you get when you realize you left the oven on in another country.
The music doesn’t help. Mychael Danna’s score tries to create atmosphere, but it mostly sounds like a haunted elevator breaking down in slow motion. It wafts through the film like a sad perfume commercial for people who haven’t felt anything since the Trudeau administration. There’s an attempt to build mood, but the mood in question is “quiet existential panic at an abandoned Sears.”
And the editing—oh god, the editing. Egoyan cuts between scenes like he’s assembling a ransom video. Time collapses and reassembles itself without warning. You’ll be watching Lisa watch a video of Lance watching Clara write a script about her brother who died, and then—bam—you’re in a boardroom being told the project has been compromised by marketing. It’s not just disorienting. It’s soul-crushing. It’s what would happen if you gave an Etch A Sketch to a philosophy major and told him to edit a soap opera with it.
The film wants to make Big Statements about communication, commodification, grief, and the falseness of media representation. But instead of saying anything coherent, it just kind of slumps in the corner and shrugs, like a grad student who just realized their thesis might be garbage. You keep waiting for the moment of revelation, the dramatic climax, the emotional payoff—and it never comes. It just ends. Like a voicemail that cuts off before the punchline.
Ultimately, Speaking Parts is a film about people who can’t connect, made by a director who refuses to connect with his audience. It’s not bold, it’s not brave—it’s an act of cinematic self-sabotage wrapped in a turtleneck and mumbling about semiotics. If you squint hard, you might find meaning in its pixelated portrait of urban loneliness. Or you might just fall asleep and dream about better movies, like watching Videodrome on beta tape or an episode of Law & Order recorded on a toaster.
Final verdict? Speaking Parts is a film about silence, and you’ll be screaming internally the entire time. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching someone frown into a webcam for 93 minutes. Watch it if you’re looking for inspiration on how not to communicate—or if you’ve run out of antidepressants and want to see what rock bottom looks like in 480p.