Contrary to Miramax’s hyperbolic Hollywood advertising, Atom Egoyan’s labyrinthine work Exotica is not the erotic thriller it purports to be. Rather, Exotica, named after the Toronto strip club around which it’s built, is a work of subterranean connections and coincidences, psychological warfare and compelling rivalries, finely wrought by Egoyan into an unsettling, dramatic plot. 

In the murky blue light of this Toronto strip club, Francis Brown, a regular grieving the loss of his daughter, buys the company of dancer Christina. Far from a series of transactional erotic exchanges, their ritual meetings express a shared intimacy based more on loss and grief than superficial thrills. They talk, though we don’t really know what is they talk about. Only that they get “intense” as the club’s DJ notes, in a no less intense scene. As the pair’s fates intermingle with those of the club’s owner, DJ, and Thomas – a pet shop owner involved in smuggling rare macaw eggs – the film’s complex geometry is revealed in a thrilling sequence of events that shows Egoyan at the height of his dramatic powers.

This tension also finds expression in the percussive rhythms of the film’s soundscape. Rarely does the film relax into moments of still silence, as if to highlight the inescapable noise that muffles human understanding, indeed, self-understanding. Despite the claustrophobic connections that bind this motley group of characters, they appear separate, distant from each other, as if wounded somehow into the same, mysterious plot. Perhaps, like Shakespeare’s comedies, the characters will find resolution in a pomp-filled, ceremonial ending? There’s something like that, but in the way you least expect it. Described by Egoyan as “the best ending I’ve ever come up with”, the simplicity of the film’s final image belies its endlessly compelling, patterned interiors.