Hide and Seek with Atom Egoyan

I think I would’ve liked Seven Veils more if I hadn’t finally watched The Adjuster right before it. Atom Egoyan’s latest feature, which premiered at TIFF in 2023, was finally released earlier this year and was hailed by many as a return-to-form for the Canadian filmmaker who had lost his way out of his own psychotic puzzle boxes. And there’s plenty to love about Seven Veils—it’s Egoyanian family mystery, the nested storytelling (in this case, a remounting of Salome, which was filmed while Egoyan was directing the play himself with the Canadian Opera Company), and Amanda Seyfried’s performance at the film’s center is particularly remarkable. Unfortunately, her Chloe-esque narration cut through too much of the narrative’s opacity and guided me too easily to its unseen traumas. On the surface, it demonstrates that Egoyan still “has it,” but he for one reason or another doesn’t trust that the audience will follow him through anymore. The Adjuster is on the opposite end of the spectrum—where Seven Veils is generous with its narrative clarity, The Adjuster withholds almost everything.

The film opens with Elias Koteas’ character awake at night in a bedroom. There’s the sound of fucking heard through the walls, and a woman sleeping near him. It’s so dark in the room, you can’t tell where they are—an apartment, or a hotel perhaps? He has to leave for work. He goes to a burning house, he’s an insurance adjuster, he’s there to help.

In its first half in particular, The Adjuster keeps moving with a novelistic lack of clarity. People and places don’t feel fixed, and their specificities are detached from any kind of normalcy. The house Koteas, his wife (played by Egoyan’s, Arsinée Khanjian), wife’s sister, and son all live in is a model home for a suburb that’s never been built, surrounded by fields of dirt and signs for places that will never come to be, which Koteas recreationally shoots with a bow in the mornings. He puts up his clients all in the same motel, forming a bizarre side-society of people uncoupled from their daily lives. Meanwhile Khanjian’s character works at the censor board, where she secretly films the violent and pornographic works to show to her sister. On the train to work one day, she spots what looks like a homeless man dying in the corner of the car. A wealthy woman in red sits down next to him and puts his hand under her skirt. The film follows them, and they turn out to be an ultra-wealthy couple with an obsession for role-playing.

Everything in The Adjuster is at once psychologically emotive yet completely dissonant through its artifice. The film’s practically Ballardian in nature in its focus on latent libidinal forces as well as the near alien way that everyone interacts with each other, but then it’s further filtered through its ensemble construction, where sequences don’t so much build towards a coherence of narrative (at least not at first, and definitely not openly), and instead serve to directly contrast or match each other. For instance, there’s a cut about 15 minutes into the movie where Koteas is trying to comfort a woman (played by Jennifer Dale, who recently gave a similarly dissociative performance in the first scene in The Shrouds) whose house just burned down; when Koteas tells her she’s in a state of shock, the film immediately cuts to Khanjian reacting to some tortuous horror film she is watching at the censor’s office.

The filming that Khanjian’s doing catches the eye of a new member of the censor board team played by Egoyan regular Don McKellar, who, along with the department head (David Hemblen) believe she’s doing it for titillation. They bring it to her attention that they know not to bust her, but to tell her there are more people like her, like themselves. What’s interesting here is that she’s not taping the films for her own pleasure, but to show her sister, who’s separated from most by a language barrier but intensely wants to know what her sister does for work—watching the films keeps her connected, at first by horrifying her, then exciting her.

The censorship office, like many of the locations in the movie—the model house, the funky motel, the burned-out homes—feels like a space out of a dream, looking less like a bureau and more like some old library or carefully-constructed archive, with wrap-around banistered overhangs looking down to the floor at shelves and desks with green lamps. It’s less a real place than it is the subconscious conception of where the images and memories no one is supposed to see are filed away. The oneiric world of the censor is just one of the dreamlike microcosms that the film floats between, with Egoyan like a cinematic Virgil as he guides us through a nightmare of the suburban, nuclear familial darkness that isn’t supposed to be seen.