I'll admit that Exotica, my first Egoyan movie, was actually better than I'd expected, but it's become apparent after several of his movies that it is just like every other Egoyan film. In his own way, Atom Egoyan is a more predictable filmmaker than M. Night Shyamalan. He's Nicholas Sparks-level predictable...So, spoilers for all Egoyan pictures coming up in both the micro and macro levels, I'm going to give them all away.
- The Big Secret-- Where Shyamalan films became predictable because you knew to expect the “what a twist!” at the end, Atom Egoyan always has a Big Secret one of the characters is keeping, and when it is revealed, it will retroactively inform all their actions. These movies are always dialogue heavy, and whichever character spends their time telling stories and providing lengthy soliloquies to the other characters... well... they're lying. If you know this, it becomes very easy to predict how the movie will end, because the entire film is built around this character's misdirection. The more time they spend trying to lead you away from the Big Secret, the more obvious the nature of the secret becomes.
- Dour and Stultifying-- no one will ever have any fun in these movies. Egoyan makes “dark” films about “serious” issues, where “troubled” people and burdened by their dark and inescapable “drama.” There's never a laugh in these movies... not even Where the Truth Lies, which is about a Martin and Lewis-style comedy duo.
- Kink/Perversion-- and the air of seriousness is really hard to take seriously when the stories always seem to go to the well of anything from (at least) naughty sex to (at most) child abuse and molestation.
- Hot, Young Lesbians-- I swear, this is why Egoyan got into filmmaking. These scenes are extensive, graphic, and shot like soft-core porn. Though the Big Secret of Where the Truth Lies is that Martin had a big gay crush on Lewis (and the girl who found out is dead), Egoyan has no interest in filming Colin Firth making love to Kevin Bacon-- not when he can slip Alison Lohman a roofie and have her tumble into bed with a girl in an Alice in Wonderland costume. So it's not a gay thing; it's all hot young lesbian sex, all the time. And, yes, Chloe's Julianne Moore isn't a pretty little starlet, but her long and graphic sex scene is with Amanda Seyfried. Admittedly, it doesn't happen in every Eoyan picture, but I'm pretty sure it's a 2/3rds majority.
- Great Tragedy-- All of the heavy breathing is apparently justified by a Great Tragedy that haunts the film (and will be related to the Big Secret). The Great Tragedy is so oppressive that it is crushing the souls of most of the characters, so much so that they didn't even have any fun while having all of that serious, somber sex.
- Death-- There's no way around it. Either the person with the Big Secret has to die, or their Big Secret is that someone's dead because of them.
So... yes, in the first act of Chloe, as Seyfried is telling the stories of her sexual exploits and maneuvering (and we see them hazily, in her mind's eye), my Egoyan Sense started tingling and I knew: she's keeping a Big Secret, and these stories she's telling are false. The pattern has become so unmistakable that I immediately knew how the film would end. I'm pretty sure this cookie-cutter formula negates these movies' play at art, which seemed to balance out the inherent smuttiness; with all the mock-serious pretense stripped away, these movies are just... sleazy. In a Joe Eszterhas sort of way.
As a postscript-- I never saw Ararat. I know that it centers on the Armenian genocide, and so its Great Tragedy and Dour Mood must be firmly in place, but I’m not sure I want to watch an Egoyan sex scene with a holocaust as the backdrop.