Chloe

From director Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”) comes another lurid tale of forbidden sexual desire.  When Catherine (Julianne Moore) suspects her husband David (Liam Neeson) of cheating, she hires a beautiful escort named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him and report the details back to her.  Chloe does her job faithfully at first, but soon she’s doing her job a little too well.  As Chloe’s stories about David become increasingly intense, Catherine finds herself unexpectedly aroused by her husband’s infidelity.  Soon Catherine and Chloe are entrenched in their own affair and you begin to wonder what Chloe’s endgame is.  The film is beautifully shot and heavy on style, but at times it feels like one step above late-night Cinemax (a.k.a. Skinemax) and less like an art-house film.  Egoyan delivers on the hot-and-heavy, and the steamy sex scene between Moore and Seyfried lives up to the hype, but there’s not enough insight into Chloe’s ulterior motives to make this a satisfying psychological thriller.  Moore does an excellent job of bringing Catherine to life.  Catherine is an extremely lonely woman who realizes she and her husband have drifted apart but feels powerless to stop it.  Even though I disliked the character of Catherine at first (she is such a doormat that she can’t even confront her husband and ask him outright if he’s cheating, and on top of that she lets her morose teen son walk all over her), Moore portrays her with such a sadness and quiet desperation that you can’t help but end up sympathizing with her.  Seyfried does her best playing the enigmatic seductress, but we never get a feel for what Chloe is really about.  I think the mystery around Chloe may have more to do with how the character was written and less with Seyfried’s inexperience with playing a femme fatale.  Instead of being fierce, Chloe comes off as vulnerable and confused, and maybe even a little mentally unstable.  In the end, I felt like there was a missing element from this movie that was always just out of reach, and it leaves you feeling a little cold instead of hot and bothered.


3 out of 5 stars