Atom Egoyan is another director of some renown, a Canadian of Armenian extraction, and this is the first of his works I’ve seen. I’ve seen this described as a drama but it’s nothing of the sort. As my wife noticed very quickly, this is a surrealist film in the style of David Lynch, down to similar choices in music. Unfortunately unlike Lynch’s work this does not boast of high production standards and as I have a hard time connecting to what it wants to say, this is not something that I care for at all.

Noah Render’s job has him being woken up in the middle of the night by a telephone call to attend to some emergency, usually a fire. He is an insurance adjuster and it is his job to attend to insured clients to help them assess the value of their claims. He goes further than that basic service, frequently repeating the motto that they are in shock even if they don’t realize it themselves and must be helped through this drastic change in their lives. His clients are so appreciative of his emotional support that the women seem to regularly sleep with him. His wife works an unusual job as well as she is a censor who watches films with extreme graphic content to classify them properly. Into their lives enter Bubba who is extremely wealthy but seems to have to no idea what to do with his life. He becomes fascinated by their house and gains access to it by offering to pay them to use it as a filming location.

Just about every character in this film is either eccentric, weird or downright perverted. Noah’s wife Hera actually encounters Bubba first on the subway where he appears to be a drunken tramp of some kind. A woman comes to sit next to him and moves his hand to touch herself intimately. Hera looks on but does nothing and this pattern recurs throughout the entire film. The surrealism suffuses everything. For example we keep seeing Noah tending to his clients and attending calls but we never see anyone else from the insurance company and never see him go to the office so we’re left to wonder if his job is even real. Hera’s workplace looks like some kind of dystopian science-fiction idea of what a censorship office would be like. There’s actually so much weirdness that nothing feels rooted in any kind of normality and there’s no baseline to compare things to. To me, it makes it feel as if none of this matters as none of it can possibly be real anyway.

As far as I can tell, the film’s primary theme is about human interactions that are superficially warm but lack any sincerity. Egoyan’s own inspiration was observing how strange it was for insurance adjusters to provide so much emotional support for victims of disasters. That’s certainly an original idea and we can see how Noah seems to do and say all the right things but there’s no human warmth in his interactions. That only makes it more weird when his clients are overly grateful to him. I suppose Bubba’s story is a kind of corollary as he says he is wealthy enough to have anything but doesn’t know what he is supposed to want. There’s arguably a common core about who a person really is underneath but it’s still not really anything that impresses me.

This film seems to have particularly hailed as being one of the more noteworthy Canadian films but that’s like rooting for the local champions while acknowledging that they’re not quite as good as the best the world has to offer. Its low production values and budget really hurts it in that regard as I suspect that the director might have been able to make a more interesting film with a freer hand. Some of his later films have met with much more commercial success but I’m not holding out much hope that I’ll like them more.