EXOTICA

One of the defining independent films of the 1990s, Atom Egoyan’s mesmerizing international breakthrough EXOTICA takes the conventions of the psychological thriller into bold new territory — unsettling, dreamlike, and empathetic. At the neon-drenched Toronto strip club of the film’s title, a coterie of lost and damaged souls — including a man haunted by grief, a young woman with whom he shares an enigmatic bond, an obsessive emcee, and a smuggler of rare bird eggs — search for redemption as they work through the traumas of their mysteriously interconnected histories in an obsessive cycle of sex, pain, jealousy, and catharsis.

Masterfully weaving together past and present, Egoyan constructs a spellbinding narrative puzzle, the full emotional impact of which doesn’t hit until the last piece is in place. Thirty years on, EXOTICA feels more and more like the great Canadian filmmaker’s masterpiece, the purest expression of the aesthetic and themes that would define an entire career.