THE BIG PICTURE

Liam Neeson’s charisma shines in action films, but his vulnerability and complexity are on display in the underrated thriller Chloe .
Chloe delves into themes of denial, aging, and manipulation, as characters navigate a web of deceit and self-awareness.
Atom Egoyan’s exploration of fantasy vs. reality adds depth to the film, despite a third act shift in tone that may be jarring for some viewers.

Pop quiz: remember when Liam Neeson was truly vulnerable? A huge part of the appeal of his turn as an action star is his ability to add far more gravitas than anything on the page offers. Those films tend to put Neeson in a good light. The gravitas comes from the complex but relatable characters – a man who either desperately doesn’t want to be in the situation he’s currently stuck in, or lives with agonizing regret from long ago. It’s ironic that Taken, the film that redefined his legacy, would paint him as just an ordinary guy who happens to be a CIA agent and a badass, with no damaged background or real internal complexity to speak of. If that sense of inner complexity and vulnerability is something you’re looking for from Neeson. This vulnerability was front and center in the undersung Atom Egoyan erotic thriller Chloe, which put Neeson’s masculinity under a deeply uncomfortable microscope.

Suspecting her husband of infidelity, gynecologist Dr. Catherine Stewart hires an escort named Chloe in order to test his faithfulness. Soon, the relationships between all three intensify.

What Is ‘Chloe’ About?

Catherine (Julianne Moore) is living a dream life, being a highly successful OB-GYN and happily married to her college professor husband, David (Neeson). It’s David’s birthday, and he’s flying back from one of his typical trips, and Catherine wants to surprise him with a party. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be, as he calls and tells her he has just missed the flight. When he finally arrives home, all seems well, until Catherine sees a flirtatious text on his phone from an unknown woman. She immediately thinks that he’s cheating, despite no smoking gun evidence, and she doesn’t know what to do. That is until she meets Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), a professional escort with whom she develops a rapport, and hatches a plan. She’ll hire Chloe to meet David, seeing if he will become enticed by her charms, and use that as proof that he’s a cheater. What starts out as amateur sleuthing will become something much more complicated as Catherine goes through an awakening that she never saw coming.

The film opens with a juxtaposition of scenes. The first is Chloe describing her work process as an escort, how she molds herself to be whoever her client wants her to be. She emphasizes how important the power of words can be, and how effortlessly they paint a picture that will appeal to the client’s fixations. The second scene is Catherine having a consultation with a patient who rarely, if ever, had a real orgasm, and she breaks it down on a level of cold rationality: that it’s just a muscle contraction that brings the body a feeling of pleasurable sensation. In her words, “there’s nothing magical about it.” With this opening salvo, we get the fundamental thesis that the film will play on: sexuality not as a raw physical act, but a product of intellectual and emotional creation, and how easily our minds will latch onto whatever connections necessary to make a fantasy feel real. But if the fantasy becomes reality, or if a person wills it into becoming real, what then?

‘Chloe’s Characters Form a Trio of Tragic Denial

Nothing breeds a lack of self-awareness quite like comfort, and if anything binds the trio of Catherine, David, and Chloe together, it’s their shared sense of denial, and how severely that denial impacts their lives. In Catherine’s case, she’s grappling with the prospect of getting older and feeling a lack of confidence in how to be sexy anymore. She feels like she’s still young on the inside, but she can’t align that with how she looks and how her life has turned out. Not only has she embraced a career which has her view the sexual lives of women through a coldly scientific lens, she’s reached a point in her relationship with David where they’ve long since stopped touching each other and coast off of the placidity of a cordial marriage. It isn’t until she’s confronted with the idea of her husband engaging in sexual activity with another woman that she’s able to get back in touch with her dormant feelings, seemingly unaware of the underlying meaning of her pushing Chloe to keep seeing David. Catherine’s assertion that David isn’t the client, but she is, will become far more prophetic than she initially realized. It’s fairly telling that when she has the inkling that her husband is cheating, rather than directly confronting him, she hatches an elaborate scheme, both avoiding having to confront any harsh encounters and having an excuse to see that fetching escort she saw crying in the bathroom.

Chloe comes off the most self-assured of these protagonists, fully in command of herself. She knows how to do her job, respects her craft and her approach, and isn’t afraid of its implications. She has the gift of a born storyteller in her ability to convey these dalliances with David in a way that you can tell is having an effect on Catherine, but not in the way you might expect. Her instinct is so sharp that, when she tells one of her stories and notices Catherine is having a reaction, she asks if it’s turning her on in a tone that implies a wish to please her voluntary audience. This reaches a point where Chloe may have to confront some feelings she’s never had before, and Seyfried does some of the best work of her career by injecting every scene with a gradually increasing sense of “wait, how real is she right now?,” without tipping too far into overly meta territory. Her whole career has been built around “finding something to love in everyone” and knowing what “not to criticize,” and it creates a layer of possibility where everything she says she did with David is being filtered through what she knows Catherine wants to hear. It shows her social intelligence and how she can effectively hide the level of manipulation that she’s capable of, up to a point.

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As for David, the worst thing you could say about him is that he’s self-absorbed in his comfort. He has no awareness of how clearly he flirts with every woman he sees, made obvious by an early scene where he flirts with a waitress that looks just like Catherine in front of her. He steadfastly insists that he would never cheat on her, but given how bad he is at giving straight answers even when he’s in the right, you can’t blame her for being suspicious. David is a character who is always at arm’s length from the audience, and it speaks to Neeson’s gruff charisma that he can make us believe him as a casual Lothario, with the way the timber of his voice adds a sensuous intentionality, but also believe him as a man deeply wounded at the thought of his wife seeing him as a betrayer. No summation of the central issue between him and Catherine can be better than when he asks her “when did we stop picking each other up at the airport?” and Neeson gut punches you with how vulnerable it feels. You want so badly to trust him, but it doesn’t help any that you witness multiple scenes of him having discreet meetings with Chloe, reinforcing the possibility of deception. All the more complicated when we realize that all of these scenes are simply visual accompaniments to Chloe’s stories, and that’s where the genius of Atom Egoyan comes into play.

Atom Egoyan Dissects the Lines Between Fantasy and Reality With ‘Chloe’

Atom Egoyan delivered a great cinematic streak when he proved to be a master at weaving intricate humanist drama out of excavating the murkiness of memory and perception. His most notable film, The Sweet Hereafter, for which he was nominated for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars, is the best example of his signature style and fixations, using the editing to slip between past and present and multiple perspectives to paint a portrait of a small town devastated by a great tragedy. Different accounts don’t add up, people’s true intentions don’t align with their actions, and numerous plotlines of the agony of silently suffering everyday mundane life are woven together with a grace that forgives all the characters’ weaknesses. That description could fit a number of his other films, like Felicia’s Journey or Where the Truth Lies, all mysteries hurtling towards revelations of emotional truth that serve as skeleton keys, serving as the final piece in the puzzle of the characters’ psyches. It always skated right up to the line of tripping into the treacly, overly schematized schmaltz of films like Crash, but Egoyan’s touch was too deft to be so heavy-handed.

Chloe isn’t quite like any of his prior films, as it’s perhaps his most straightforward film, working confidently through the genre conventions of erotic thrillers and relationship dramas alike. If there’s any significant flaw with the film, it’s the awkward third act shift from Egoyan’s more ethereal pondering of the vagaries of partners’ behaviors towards each other into the shallower Single White Female plot mechanics, while still reaching for the profundity of the earlier sections. It’s a jarring mismatch of tone and material, but give credit to Egoyan for not backing away from applying his specific vibe to what’s essentially a typical potboiler. All the same, his sensibility does lead to moments that seek to subvert the staid sense of proceedings in the plot. Moreover, his utilization of Neeson’s character, particularly at the moment of the movie’s big reveal, remains compelling throughout. How many other straightforward thrillers can you think of where the incriminating flashbacks lead you astray from the truth rather than towards it? Egoyan knows how potent our fantasies and memories are in our psyche, and Chloe taps into how, even when it comes to a person we believe we truly love the most, sometimes it’s much more the idea of that person that we crave, and will use whatever conduit we can to grip onto that idea.

Chloe is currently available to buy or rent on Prime Video in the U.S.