Chloe (2009) Reviews

• Amanda Seyfried takes my heart away with her beauty an underrated tragic love drama

  ivo-cobra82018-02-18

  Chloe (2009) is really underrated love tragic drama. It is not that bad of a film I really liked it. I am not a drama love story fan guy but this movie really surprise me. It was not boring, over long or over dramatic like some movies are! It has a love drama and it ends with a twist and with a tragedy on the end of the film. Amanda Seyfried took my heart away with her acting, her beauty and I feel remorse for her character. I understood her character. I know now is based on the earlier French film Nathalie... (2003) I know that film is praised since Chloe come out, but who cares! I hated Dear John and Notebook I hated those films. The only films I liked in drama were American Beauty, Great Expectations that was a based on a novel and The Vow I like those movies. Chloe this movie also has an erotic thriller about seducing and manipulating other peoples and it has a message. Don't belive anything and anyone you hear from people. Julianne Moore is fantastic and the women can act. She is awesome actress she is one the actresses I like and that's rarely by me. Liam Neeson is excellent as always I love this guy. I love Taken, Non-Stop in which Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson reunite again. A Walk Among the Tombstones, Unknown and Run All Night. I love the actor even in this drama he is so good. The thriller that was in this movie reminds me in other movies like are: Fatal Attraction. The Game, Disclosure and The Boy Next Door. 8/10 this is a tragic love story and that a good one, It worked by me I understand the character, the movie worked better then in other movies. In my opinion I like it! Atom Egoyan did a good job directing this movie. Response to a nutcase below me: the movie is not bland it is at least much better than your stupid dumb movie Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Justice. F**K Off!

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• Something A LOT different for Amanda Seyfried....6.5/10

  IheartCali58822010-05-24

  This film reminded me of the 90's wave of erotic thrillers. It's got all the elements, including a healthy dose of softcore sex scenes which surprised me because Amanda Seyfried has such an endearing, innocent look about her. But she's such a good actress though that this doesn't prevent her from convincingly playing the role of seductive call girl Chloe. Julianne Moore plays Catherine, a gynecologist who suspects her flirtatious husband (Liam Neeson) is having an affair with one of his students. While at work Catherine observes Chloe entering and exiting hotels with several men so she can make a pretty good guess at Chloe's profession. Catherine decides to use Chloe as bait to see if her husband would submit to the temptation of an affair with Chloe. And even though that is the basic storyline, there is so much more that is left unsaid; things Catherine thinks she knows but doesn't know about her husband, things Chloe knows about Catherine that Catherine herself doesn't even know; and in the middle of it all, the viewer who finds out we didn't know much at all about it all. The audience is pretty much kept in the dark as to what is really going on with Chloe until one small scene that immediately switches the direction of the movie. It's not one of those hokey melodramatic twists, but will definitely have you playing back the entire movie in your mind because it sheds everything in a new light. Chloe brags at the beginning of the film, in a voice-over narration, that she has the gift of intuiting what people want and need without it being said. She can be all things to all people. And unfortunately for Julianne Moore's character, Chloe is exactly right....just not in the way that you might initially think she is. What makes this movie good is that it has layers. Just as in real life, people are inevitably much different than what they appear to be on the surface. In a lesser film, the characters and plot would be one-dimensional and by far less interesting.

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• Textbook Egoyan

  MaxBorg892010-07-18

  If anyone was suited for remaking the French film Nathalie, it was Atom Egoyan, whose deeply twisted and occasionally perverse studies of sexuality, expressed through an apparently cold directorial eye, go hand in hand with a script that emphasized words over images (though there is a bit more flesh in the English-language transition). Hence the rather brilliant Chloe, whose prime accomplishment lies in its being less showy and pretentious than the director's previous foray into erotic secrets, the ambitious Where the Truth Lies. Set in Egoyan's home town of Toronto, Chloe tells the story of the eponymous call girl (Amanda Seyfried) who is hired by gynecologist Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) when the latter starts to suspect her husband (Liam Neeson) is having an affair. Chloe's job is to casually approach him and see if he falls for her charm, thus indicating his propensity for adultery. However, as the girl's reports get more and more graphic, Catherine realizes she has put herself in an awkward position, one that it will be difficult to get out of. A fascinating hybrid between psychological drama and erotic thriller (there's a vague hint of Fatal Attraction throughout the movie), Chloe is a rarity due to its attempt to analyze sex and its consequences without necessarily resorting to openly titillating imagery (a characteristic Egoyan shares with another Canadian maestro, David Cronenberg). The only downside of this approach is the same flaw that was much more evident in Where the Truth Lies, namely a deliberately slow pace that affects the thriller aspects but enhances the emotional poignancy, something that comes off as a paradox given the seemingly cold subject matter. Furthermore, there is no coldness to be found in the carefully crafted performances: Neeson and Moore play the troubled couple with conviction, especially when things start getting more complicated (Moore's suspicious wife is a tour de force turn that should have received some award recognition), but the heart of the film lies, quite predictably, in Seyfried's hands, and she rises to the challenge by proving that she can do Big Love-style quality work on the big screen, embodying a complex, intriguing character light years away from her roles in Mamma Mia! and Mean Girls. Overall, Chloe is a very good movie: sexy without being gratuitous, psychological without getting pompous and, like its title character, delightfully surprising.

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• Solid erotic thriller even if predictable

  BernardoLima2010-05-23

  When David (Liam Neeson) misses his flight home from New York and, as a result, the surprise party his wife Catherine (Julianne Moore) has planned for him, Catherine is forced to swallow her disappointment and any suspicions and return to the waiting guests. Reading a text message sent to David's phone the following morning from one of his female students, Catherine's fear grows. More suspicious than ever that David is having an affair, Catherine seeks out Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), an escort, hiring her to test David's fidelity. Chloe is a very solid thriller. Extremely engaging and incredibly entertaining, this story is ultimately about human nature and instincts. The film really grabs your attention and visually, it's quite a feat. The minimalistic sets and the way it was shot give this film a really modern and slick look. I feel like I should warn that there's quite a bit of nudity and somewhat graphic scenes but nothing outrageous or out of place. Moore was absolutely terrific, she has proved her value already but here she delivers possibly one of the best performances of her career. Seyfried was quite a surprise. Her performance was subtle but very efficient and she seems a very promising young actress. Liam Neeson was not nearly as good as he usually is but it's understandable considering his wife died during the shooting of the film. As I said, Chloe is a very solid and well done film. Unfortunately it has one major flaw, the predictably of the plot. I saw the twist coming from a mile way and I think any avid movie-goer will too. Still, it was a great watch, very entertaining and extremely well acted. Worth seeing. 7/10

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• 'I must find something, no matter how small, that I can love...'

  gradyharp2010-07-15

  Atom Egoyan ('The Sweet Hereafter', 'Ararat', 'Where the Truth Lies') has a gift for setting up cinematic surveillance of private encounters and studying the results of an incident on everyone witnessing it. In CHLOE he has engaged the services of Erin Cressida Wilson to adapt the French film NATHALIE by Anne Fontaine to place it on this side of the pond. In the French version the successful actors were Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, and Gérard Depardieu: for this version Egoyan has an equally superb cast to carry off this mysterious story with great success. The same question arises in both films: 'what is imagined and what is real?', and it is the getting there that makes this film so fascinating. Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) is a gynecologist married to the successful professor of music David (Liam Neeson) and they have a stay-at-home hippie son Michael (Max Thieriot) who goes about his life much the same as his parents: there is superficial companionship but little in depth relationship. The marriage seems satisfactory until Catherine plans a surprise birthday party for David, a party David doesn't attend, and Catherine suspects David of having affairs, a fact that David apparently suggests by his flirtations with waitresses and 'help'. Catherine is shocked, but realizes that as she is aging this may be a normal situation in older marriages. Catherine visits a bar, a private club for assignations, and there she meets Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) and eventually buys Chloe's services as a prostitute to meet her husband and then tell her all about the encounters. It is agreed that Chloe will be paid for her services and only go as far as Catherine instructs. From this point on Catherine and Chloe meet after Chloe has encounters with David and describes the acts of the encounters in vivid and lurid detail. Catherine is fascinated and continues to pay Chloe for on going encounters and subsequent voyeuristic descriptions. Catherine even has a one-night stand of her own with Chloe in an attempt to understand her husband's need for infidelity. Despite the setup of 'private investigator and prostitute detective' the two women become friends. When Catherine realizes she has enough evidence against David to leave him there is a final encounter of the three (Catherine, David, Chloe, and even son Michael) that brings the ingenious surprise ending - an ending too fine to share as it would spoil the film for viewers new to the story. Each of the actors does a star turn - Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried, and Liam Neeson - and once again Atom Egoyan takes an implausible story and makes us think. Grady Harp

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