It’s hard to decide whether the protagonists of Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster, Noah and Vera, carry out their jobs with an excess of empathy or sinister ulterior motives. What’s certain is that both are possessed by voyeurism: Noah gets intimately involved in the lives of the people he assists as an insurance claims adjuster; Hera makes recordings of the most explicit parts of the films she assesses as a censor to show her sister, with whom she shares everything. Voyeurism – expressed in the charged prominence it gives images and image-making – is the unseemly energy coursing through The Adjuster.

This is a film about filming, a picture of people making pictures. Hera’s bulky 1980s camcorder and Bubba’s noisy analogue camera are conspicuous tools that don’t just mediate but define their users’ experience of the world. (They are all the more conspicuous in 2020 as period pieces.) Navigating the world through making images isn’t exactly endorsed by the film – in fact, it often seems suspect or seedy – but it is rendered deeply recognisable: in the background, after all, are Egoyan’s act of filmmaking and our own appetite for consuming what he shows. 

Reciprocally, the consumption of images is as prominent and as ambiguous as their making. Noah uses photos taken in the homes of the victims of house fires to evaluate losses, deliberately extracting peripheral, unintentional details from pictures of dinner parties or erotic bedroom shots. There is unrestrainable potential in these images: they decide fates and shape relationships, no matter how shallow (or profound) the reason for their making. Meanwhile, Hera’s sister, Seta, burns photos of their home country because the memories they summon are too painful to bear. Through these singed black and white snapshots, the too-real history of the Armenian Genocide is tacitly introduced into the film’s sinewy fiction, and the distanced effect that characterises the film – the distance of a voyeur – is recast as a meditation on the effects of exile. In particular, growing up in exile; Hera and Noah’s young son emerges, reflexively, as a central figure. “You probably don’t feel it,” Noah likes to say to his clients, “but you’re in a state of shock.” ◉

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