Chloe

A suspicious wife (Julianne Moore) hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to tempt her professor husband (Liam Neeson), but what starts out as a test of his faithfulness becomes, for her, a vicarious, guilty erotic enjoyment of his infidelity. Director Atom Egoyan’s latest movie is written by someone else (Erin Cressida Wilson) and based on an earlier film (France’s Nathalie, 2003), but it exudes his sensibilities as clearly as if it had sprung entirely from his own watchful, thoughtful imagination. The movie bristles with low-key irony—a chorus of “Happy Birthday” drowns out Mozart; the wife is a gynecologist, too clinical by half yet susceptible to furtive thrills. As with all of Egoyan’s movies, there’s a feeling of life beneath and behind the screen, of still waters running deep, dark and roiling.