The Adjuster

Noah is an insurance adjuster; he visits people whose houses have burned, calculates the damage and puts them up in a motel. Then he visits them there and sleeps with some of them. His wife Hera works on the board that classifies films; she watches obscene scenes, takes notes and secretly records them. Both of them make a living from other people's disasters. The subject is not insurance but distance. In their work Noah and Hera enter other people's most private moments and both treat it as unfeeling technical business; at home they never touch each other. The form is cold and orderly: a show home standing alone in the middle of an empty new development, motel rooms, a screening room. Atom Egoyan deliberately leaves scenes unexplained and the connections form at the end. The production is early Egoyan and lays out the concerns he would return to: recording, watching, and the carrying of trauma. Arsinée Khanjian is his wife and appears in all of his films. Elias Koteas plays Noah and Maury Chaykin the man who comes to the house. Who it is for: viewers who like Canadian independent cinema and distanced, unexplaining narratives. Who it is not for: anyone who wants the connections made immediately; the film withholds what is happening for a long time.