THE ADJUSTER Movie Review

Canadian wunderkind Atom Egoyan's films can be as tantalizing as they are frustratingly distant (including his breakthrough hit, The Sweet Hereafter), and his 1991 The Adjuster is one of the films that demonstrates his strengths and weaknesses most clearly. It's the story of an insurance adjuster named Noah (Elias Koteas) whose clients have had catastrophic accidents, forcing them to become utterly dependent on this seemingly benevolent man. But Noah is something of a voyeur, as is his wife, Hera, a film censor who secretly videotapes the pornography she sits through and passes judgment on day after day. Noah, however, carries his little fetish a bit further, placing his clients in “temporary” motel housing where he can keep a close eye on them, manipulating them, deciding their futures, rewriting their lives. Together, this quietly ghoulish couple spend their days in a creepy suburban dream home, which happens to be the only completed house in an unfinished subdivision. The Adjuster raises its extraordinary central conceit about the delicate lines separating curiosity, voyeurism, and sadism, and then unceremoniously drops the ball, introducing still another couple who are even more insistently manipulative than Noah and Hera, but in far less surprising or darkly funny ways. The Adjuster is one of those memorable failures that you root for during most of its running time, even when it's limping to a halt. A key, though incomplete, piece of the mystery of Atom Egoyan, The Adjuster irritates more than it should, perhaps because its first hour so intoxicatingly raises such great expectations.

NEXT STOP … Calendar, Exotica, The Stepfather

1991 (R) 102m/C CA Elias Koteas, Arsinee Khanjian, Maury Chaykin, Gabrielle Rose, David Hemblen, Jennifer Dale, Don McKellar, Raoul Trujillo; D: Atom Egoyan; W: Atom Egoyan; C: Paul Sarossy; M: Mychael Danna.Toronto-City Award ‘91: Best Canadian Feature Film. VHS ORI