chaos-rampant In the camera, the score, the acting, the overall air, this is worthy of Lynch and Kieslowski. It exhibits the same soft touch across all these elements. It has latenight moods I love, the languorous hum of noir mystery. I'm happy to be introduced to this filmmaker's world for the first time.But it also has something I value even more than how appearances seranade me, it has passage inside to where the formations of life begin - the surge that moves the worlds we inhabit and manifests as self, emotions and anxieties.It's about a man who looks stricken when we first see him. He goes to a strip club, a young girl in a school outfit dances for him. We're led to believe that it's simply desire, perhaps concealing a tiredness about life that has seen its best days go that he drowns at nights. It goes much deeper. There's another young girl that he drives home to her father at nights, no explanations given. We assume some unethical business. We assume a burden with her father that is not spoken out loud and just hangs between them.There's a club deejay who announces the girls as surrogate director of the show, a former lover of the girl's; he introduces her on stage as sexually mysterious, asking what is it that draws us to her, what kind of reprieve is this desire for her looking for?This along with everything else we see through the looking glass of concealed identity, amalgamated in the club (named the same as the film itself no less) as a space where performance is exchanged from behind guises. The place is marvelous, a cavernous hall with palm trees and a hushed, tropical atmosphere - but of course that's only the seductive illusion, the lush foliage probably plastic.And there's the bookish guy we first saw at airport security, a very reserved person who it's like every day is just something that slips through the fingers for him. He's running a store with tropical animals, strange and exotic beings but they're merely kept inside glass, artificially framed nature. He goes to the ballet - artificially framed nature - hoping for intimacy on the way out, unsure.Another visual segment takes place in a green field, a stroll with the dancer girl and this as getting to know her, falling for her.All this is like swimming in slow, languorous waters, so when the different layers are made to align, we break the surface to come up for air and painful clarity. All these people as trapped in vistas of their own self, their nature artificially confined by hurt. It's touching her - shattering the allowed boundaries of performance - that breaks the spell and releases first one, then the others.It's all been about this narrator who has allowed himself to remain confined in a performance, a chimera of the mind - reliving the hurt both with one girl at the club, and with the second at home. Now we are where everything comes into being. It's one of the great post noir works I know.Noir Meter: 2/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Post

gavin6942 The 'Exotica' is a nightclub on the outskirts of Toronto, where Eric (Elias Koteas), DJ and MC, watches nightly as his ex-girlfriend Christina (Mia Kirshner) performs.Sarah Polley appears in a supporting role, Mia Kirshner takes center stage, and Elias Koteas gives the best performance of his career. Koteas is a great actor, often overlooked or forgotten, or even unknown... and this is a shame. He is incredible, and should be thought of as more than just Casey Jones from the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" franchise.Roger Ebert gives this four stars and even included it as one his "great movies". He is spot on (as usual). This is a dynamite thriller, with a bit of mystery and suspense along the way. If Atom Egoyan had only made this one movie, he still would have had a full career.

Red-Barracuda This cryptic, psychological drama is centred on a strip club called Exotica. A troubled man visits the club in order to re-enact a psychologically complex relationship he has with one of the young strippers who dances for him every night. The story progresses in a low-key manner until the stories of several disparate characters, including an exotic pet shop owner and the unhappy club DJ, intertwine.This unusual drama is about obsessive behaviour and people who are unable to move on or escape from their past. By the end, with the use of some key flash-backs, it has offered several clues without explaining very much explicitly. But from these we are able to better understand why certain characters act the way they do and are in the position in life they are. It's certainly a fairly intriguing film overall that will reward those who can take the distancing effect of its overly stylised form of acting. It's labelled in some places as an erotic drama but it has to be said that for a film centred on a strip club it's really a very unerotic film. It uses this place as a springboard to explore more psychological issues than physical ones.Certainly not for all tastes but it will stick in the mind of some long after viewing.

bernie-122 Comparing this to Uwe Boll's stuff is a bit unfair, but I see where that reviewer is coming from. But, LOL, calling Leonard Cohen a Tom Waits wannabe, that's the funniest thing I've heard all year.The photography in this film almost redeems its many failings, but not quite. I get a lot of chuckles from the gushing reviews from art-house hangers-on; there is a kind of "Art-house cliché" which arises from the deliberate avoidance of Hollywood cliché. This film is full of it. You might call it "anti-cliché". But it amounts to the same thing. I see none of the freshness and vigour I look for in a good indy film.It mightn't be so bad if the plot didn't require so much suspension of disbelief. There couldn't exist a strip club such as this one, it would be just ludicrous.And why doesn't Mr. Egoyan find something else for his wife to do besides "acting" in all his movies? Anyhow, watch this if you've got nothing better on, but expect to be bored rigid waiting for the good bits.