Chloe (2010)

Chloe arrives with the pedigree of a European art film and the metabolism of a cable erotic thriller. Atom Egoyan, a director who once made films about grief and videotape, here adapts Nathalie..., a French picture from 2003, and relocates the action to a Toronto of piano recitals, upscale bars, and gynecological clinics. Julianne Moore plays Catherine, a doctor who suspects her husband of straying and hires an escort to test him. Amanda Seyfried plays the escort. There follows a long, murmuring game of telephone in which the reports of infidelity grow more explicit and Catherine's interest in the messenger grows more tangled. The film concerns desire, aging, and the fear of becoming invisible, and it mostly succeeds at atmosphere while failing at logic.

The relationship between Catherine and Chloe is same-sex and treated with emotional seriousness, which places the film in a lineage of doomed-lesbian melodrama that predates any contemporary social conversation. The intimacy is real to the characters. The ending is not kind to them. Catherine's interiority is the engine of the story, a woman's jealousy and longing driving the plot, though the film frames this as psychosexual weather instead of argument. On matters of race, climate, body image, and neurodivergence, the film offers nothing at all, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. The Stewarts have money, and Chloe is paid for her time, which produces a faint transactional chill, not a thesis.

The film remains a mood piece with a fine performance or two and a final act that tips into opera. It never lectures. It simply watches. In an era that rewards instruction, that restraint reads almost as an anachronism, and it is the most interesting thing about it.