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Looking down from her office window, she sees a young woman who has the manner and routine of a high-priced call girl. This she stores in her memory. When her husband says he missed his flight back to Toronto and she finds a disturbing photo on his iPhone, she goes to the hotel where she saw the girl, makes eye contact with her in a bar, contrives a conversation in the powder room. With perfect calm, the girl explains that single women are not usually her clients. Couples, maybe.

Director Atom Egoyan finds intrigue at the edges of conventional sex. "Chloe," like his great film " Exotica " (1994), is about sexual attraction confused by financial arrangements. "Chloe" centers on a powerfully erotic young woman with personal motives that are hidden. It is not blatant but seductive, depending on the ways that our minds, more than our bodies, can be involved in a sexual relationship. It's not so much what we're doing as what I'm thinking about it -- and what you're thinking, which may be more complex than I realize.

Catherine Stewart ( Julianne Moore ) is a gynecologist, a successful one, judging by the house she inhabits fresh from the cover of Architectural Digest. Her husband, David ( Liam Neeson ), is an expert on opera. The call girl she saw from her window is Chloe ( Amanda Seyfried ), young, red-lipped, intelligent. Catherine explains to Chloe that she suspects her husband of adultery and wants to test if he would try to pick up another woman. She tells Chloe where her husband always has lunch.

Early in the film, talking with a patient uncertain about her sex life, Catherine explains that an orgasm is a simple muscular contraction, quite natural, nothing to be frightened of or made mysterious. Orgasms for Catherine, however, involve a great deal more than muscles, and a great deal depends on who they are experienced with and why. Chloe tells her about entering a cafe, boldly asking David if she can take the sugar from his table and returning to her own. David understands that Chloe is not interested in sugar.

Chloe meets with Catherine to relate this encounter. Chloe is good at this. She informs us early in the film that she is skilled at what she does. It's not a matter of renting her body. She uses her intelligence to intuit what a client desires -- really desires, no matter what the client might claim. And she knows how to provide this in a way that will provoke curiosity, even fascination. Now she describes details to Catherine that do a great deal more than provoke a wife's jealousy about her husband. They provoke an erotic curiosity about him.

Chloe is perhaps 25 years younger than Catherine, but in many ways wiser and more experienced. She is certainly more clear about what it is she really wants. She enjoys the psychological control of her clients, and her own skill in achieving that. She looks so young and innocent, but her life has taught her many lessons. Seyfried plays Chloe as a woman in command of her instrument -- her body, which is for sale, and her mind, which works for itself. Moore, that consummate actress, undergoes a change she only believes is under her control. Neeson is an enigma to his wife and in a different way to us.

Egoyan follows his material to an ultimate conclusion. Some will find it difficult to accept. Is it arbitrary? Most of life's conclusions are arbitrary. I am not sure this particular story should, or can, be wound up in a conventional manner. It's not the kind of movie that depends on the certainty of an ending. It's more about how things continue. I have deliberately withheld much of the story, which Egoyan leaves for you to understand. His central fascination is with Chloe's motives. Does she act only for money? Does she do only what is requested? Does she remain emotionally detached? Does she get anything for herself besides money?

At one point she's asked how she can relate to some of her clients, who might seem unattractive, even repugnant. A call girl has no idea who will open the door after her knock, and the ground rules are that she will gratify the client's desires, if he can pay and she doesn't feel in personal danger. But how can she endure some of them? "I try to find something I can love," she says.

After you see the movie, run through it again in your mind. Who wants what? Who gets what? Who decides what? Whose needs are gratified? Egoyan never makes a story with one level. He never reveals all of the motives, especially to his characters. He invites us to be voyeurs of surfaces that may not conceal what they seem. Fundamental shifts can alter all the relationships. All the same, their sexuality compels his characters to make decisions based on their own assumptions. It is a tangled web he weaves.

Videos of my conversation about "Chloe" with Atom Egoyan are online here: http://j.mp/a51040

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Chloe (2010)

Julianne Moore as Catherine

Liam Neeson as David

Amanda Seyfried as Chloe

Max Thieriot as Michael

R.H. Thomson as Frank

Nina Dobrev as Anna

Directed by

• Atom Egoyan
• Anne Fontaine
• Erin Cressida Wilson

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chloe’ on Prime Video, Where A Woman Assumes A New Persona When Another Woman She’s Obsessed With Dies

Where to stream:.

• Chloe (2022)
• Stream It Or Skip It

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A genre of thriller over the past few years has centered around “the dangers of social media.” In other words, someone analyzes someone’s social media and uses that information to weasel their way into their lives, making chaos ensue. But sometimes those shows feel less than well-anchored to an actual story. A new BBC production streaming on Prime Video does that grounding, and does it well.

CHLOE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An Instagram-like scroll on a phone. You can see the screen in the reflection of they eyes of a woman looking at her phone in the dark.

The Gist: As she scrolls, Becky Green (Erin Doherty) keeps stopping on the feed of a red-haired woman named Chloe Fairbourne (Poppy Gilbert), who seems to be living a charmed life. With each well-shot, curated picture, Becky imagines the pictures in motion, showing Chloe living that life full of friends, fashion, dinner parties, etc.

Becky lives in the same Bristol flat as her mother Pam (Lisa Palfrey), who is showing early signs of Alzheimer’s. Becky goes to her temp job filling in for a pregnant executive assistant; she swipes a co-worker’s colorful jacket and ends up going to a swanky charity party as a woman named Helena. She sleeps with Josh Stanfield (Brandon Micheal Hall), whom she meets at the party, then blocks his number when she thinks he called her overnight.

Then a shocker: Chloe’s feed has a bunch of comments on it indicating that she unexpectedly died. Shocked, she endeavors to meet the people she sees in the feed in order to find out what happened. First is Livia Fulton (Pippa Bennett-Warner), an event planner and one of Chloe’s closest friends. Becky makes a new persona named Sasha and crashes a gallery opening she knows Livia will be planning.

Then, after looking at Livia’s feed, “runs into” her at a yoga class at an exclusive country club, manipulating an invite to her house for dinner when she knows that Chloe’s husband, town councilman Elliot Fairbourne (Billy Howle) will be there. But one complication pops up: Livia knows Josh, and they run into him at the country club.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At first,  Chloe looks like yet another “woman lies her way to becoming close to the woman she’s obsessed with,” like Roku’s  Swimming With Sharks or  As The Crow Flies on Netflix. But there’s a reason why Becky is obsessed with Chloe, as we find out by the end of the episode.

Our Take: The reason why Becky is so obsessed with Chloe is somewhat predictable, because a piece of the mystery, where Becky gets a call from the local police investigating her death, points to the fact that Becky and Chloe aren’t necessarily complete strangers, as Becky’s scrolling indicated at the beginning of the episode.

But  Chloe, created and written by Alice Seabright ( Sex Education ) rides completely on Doherty’s performance as Becky, as we see her slip from her somewhat dowdy worker drone persona into posh society con woman on the turn of a dime. And it’s fascinating to watch her mine social media to wiggle her way into the life Chloe had, as well as meeting her friends, her husband, and others that might give her a clue about what happened to Chloe.

At the start, it feels like most of Chloe’s friends feel like standard upper-crust British stereotypes, except for Livia; Bennett-Warner gives Livia some depth, making her someone who has a trusting nature and makes fast friends. Within a couple of outings with “Sasha,” Livia already is encouraging her to ask Josh out, and she’s opening up about Chloe’s death. Maybe it stretches credibility that Livia’s guard isn’t more up at that point, but Bennett-Warner makes us believe that Livia is just that kind of person.

But what is ultimately intriguing about  Chloe is that, while Becky is an efficient liar and what seems like a pretty good actor, she’s putting on this “Sasha” persona for a reason that’s not just about stalking and obsession. And the rest of the season is going to see her trying to get to the bottom of Chloe’s death while dealing with people like Josh, who know more about her than she would like. As her lies fall to pieces, will she get closer to the answers she needs? That question alone makes us want to watch more.

Sex and Skin: As we mentioned, Becky has sex with Josh, but she keeps her bra on while doing it.

Parting Shot: As she envisions Chloe about to jump off a cliff, she envisions the friend that she knew as a teenager, whom she lost touch with but stalked on social media for years.

Sleeper Star: Jack Farthing plays Richard Greenbank, who interrupts the oh-so-polite dinner party Livia is hosting by ranting that they all messed up when it came to keeping Chloe from killing herself.

Most Pilot-y Line: In one of her weaker excuses, Becky tells Josh that she puts on different personas “because I like to control how people see me. Now. Back. Off.” He says “OK,” but we’d be like, “Are you dangerous or just nuts?” Let’s just say we’ll hear from Josh again.

Will you stream or skip the British thriller #Chloe on @PrimeVideo ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) June 25, 2022

Our Call: STREAM IT. Because of key performances from Doherty, Hall and Bennett-Warner,  Chloe goes from a predictable stalking tale to an entertaining thriller that may take some unexpected turns.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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The Ending Of Chloe Explained

In 1994, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan exploded onto the international indie scene with "Exotica," a meditation on sex, money, and loneliness that takes place among the workers and patrons of a high-end Toronto strip club. 15 years later the director revisited that same world, but from a different angle, in the erotic thriller "Chloe." Here, the eponymous sex worker (Amanda Seyfried) works out of a fancy hotel lobby instead of a smoky club, and her clientele is not a roomful of wealthy yet pathetic men, but one man at a time — or in this case, one woman. Catherine (Julianne Moore) is a middle-aged doctor who feels invisible to the men in her life, husband David (Liam Neeson) and teenage son Max (Max Thieriot). But her desire to be seen, to be felt, to be loved again comes at a higher price than she could have imagined.

The mysteries of "Chloe" are less about the twists and turns of the plot and more about the way love and intimacy become detached from one another, either from one shocking incident or through the slow march of time. Or as David puts it late in the film, "When did we stop picking each other up from the airport?" That being said, there are several unanswered questions posed by the film's sudden veer into "Fatal Attraction" territory, and an epilogue that finds a young woman dead and a family not only undisturbed by her fate, but seemingly better off for it. Let's take a look at the end of "Chloe."

What you need to remember about the plot of Chloe

Catherine Stewart is a successful Toronto gynecologist, with a downtown office and an austere, ultramodern home in the suburbs. She begins the film as cold and closed off as her surroundings; when talking to a patient who has never had an orgasm, she downplays the experience as nothing more than a muscle contraction. Her husband David, on the other hand, is the opposite: A tall, handsome older man, a beloved university professor, and an inveterate flirt. When Catherine finds a compromising photo on his phone after a business trip to New York, she suspects that he is cheating. But rather than confront him with her suspicions, Catherine decides to catch David in the act by hiring Chloe, the escort who works the luxury hotel next door to Catherine's office, to seduce David and report back.

Chloe does her job, and then some. Her stories of sex with David leave Catherine both aghast and compelled, and try as she might, she's unable to stop herself from using the young woman as a kind of sexual surrogate. At the reception after Max's piano recital, the sight of David's hand on a waitress' arm sends Catherine into a panic. She finds Chloe (in the middle of a date with a client) and forces her up to her hotel room. Desperate to know what her husband feels like to another woman, Catherine sleeps with Chloe.

What happens at the end of Chloe

After their night of passion, Chloe becomes obsessed with Catherine, showing up at her office and flirting with Max. To make matters worse, David now suspects her of having an affair. Racked with guilt, Catherine calls a meeting for the three of them to clear the air, but when Chloe arrives, it's clear to her that David and the young woman have never actually met. The erotic stories Chloe told of their trysts in the park were just that: stories. Chloe quickly runs away, but the meeting gives Catherine and David a chance to reconnect, finally, both physically and emotionally.

David returns to work and Catherine goes home by herself, but she is not alone. While she and David were reconciling, Chloe went to their house and had sex with Max. Catherine finds the two of them asleep in the upstairs bedroom. Shocked and appalled, she confronts Chloe, who attacks her with the sharp silver hairpin that was the subject of their first conversation. In the struggle, one of the home's massive windows pops out. Chloe clings to the window frame and then falls to her death on the broken glass below. Months later, the Stewarts host a graduation party at home for Max and his friends. The family is still together, still a pillar of their community. Catherine smiles at her boys, but when she turns around, we see that she is wearing Chloe's hairpin.

Before Chloe, there was Nathalie...

"Chloe" was the first of Egoyan's feature films that he did not write or co-write himself. The script was by Erin Cressida Wilson, who had proven her erotic drama bona fides with 2002's "Secretary," but the inspiration for the film came from two different sources: Anne Fontaine's 2003 French drama "Nathalie..." which gives "Chloe" its initial premise, and producer Ivan Reitman ("Ghostbusters"), who felt that the film could be remade for North American audiences as a thriller. "Nathalie..." stars French film legends Fanny Ardant and Gerard Dépardieu as distrustful wife Catherine and unfaithful husband Bernard, respectively, and Emmanuelle Béart ("Mission: Impossible") as the sex worker Catherine solicits for erotic detective work.

While the two films share a concept and pivot on the same third-act twist that their stories of infidelity are fictional, "Nathalie..." and "Chloe" are very different viewing experiences. The original film is a much more grounded drama, without the turn toward obsession and violence that marks Egoyan's version. Ardant's Catherine and Nathalie become entwined in each other's lives, but the homoeroticism that is central to the relationship between Moore's Catherine and Chloe is little more than subtext. Depardieu's Bernard, though he never sleeps with Nathalie, is in fact an adulterer, as opposed to Neeson's David. Most notably, no one dies at the end of "Nathalie..." Instead, Béart's sex worker simply confesses her deception to Catherine and leaves the unhappy couple to themselves.

Doubles and Dynamics

Even before Catherine ends the film wearing the telltale hairpin, the film plays with the ways that Catherine sees not just Chloe, but every female character in the film as a reflection of herself — often an unflattering one. There are her patients, starting their journey into motherhood just as she is finishing hers; or the patient who has never had an orgasm, a dancer whose professional discipline has come at the cost of her most basic pleasure. There is the red-haired waitress at the restaurant who David flirts with, the spitting image of a young Catherine. There are Catherine's boozy middle-aged girlfriends who see the Stewarts as the perfect family, and Max's young girlfriend Anna ( Nina Dobrev ), whose existence Catherine regards with shock, anger, and perhaps a little jealousy.

At that dinner, while David flirts with the red-haired waitress, Catherine's colleague (R.H. Thomson) teasingly points out the number of tables around them filled with wealthy older men and young women whose attention has obviously been paid for. Catherine is scandalized, but the image of older men with younger women haunts the film afterward. Egoyan fills the background with couples in that same dynamic. It's a visual reference to Catherine's own fears about David — an older man constantly in the company of women decades his junior — as well as a foreshadowing of her own relationship with Chloe. In the end, Catherine is not much different than those men at the restaurant, a wealthy older person using an adoring young woman for sex.

Was Chloe's death an accident?

As they grapple at the film's climax, with the hairpin drawing blood from Catherine's neck, Chloe kisses her. Catherine sees Max looking on through the reflection in the bedroom window and pushes Chloe away. The force of the impact knocks the window out of its frame. Chloe grabs the frame, but after a moment her fingers slip and she falls to the ground. Catherine's panic at the moment lets us know that this is no murder. She didn't intend to kill Chloe with her shove, but Chloe's mindset is more mysterious. There is no way she could have predicted or engineered this outcome, but the question remains, was her fall from the window an accident, or did she intentionally let go?

The film's alternate endings answer this question more definitively, but in the theatrical cut, the moment is ambiguous. The way Egoyan presents Chloe's fall, in slow motion with a serene expression on Seyfried's face, certainly suggests that her death is an intentional choice — a final maneuver to stay in Catherine's life forever. But there are other details, like the way her hand grips the window frame before it slips away, or the fact that a fall from a second-story window (even onto broken glass) wouldn't necessarily be fatal, that read as accidental. Whether it was intentional or a terrible twist of fate, however, the result for the characters remains the same.

Does Chloe exist at all?

There is a dreamlike quality to both "Chloe" and Chloe herself. First glimpsed by Catherine from afar, Chloe enters the older woman's life exactly when needed, and in her own way, leaves just as conveniently. Given the fact that her sexual encounters with David were imaginary, it's not that much of a leap for audiences to wonder if Chloe herself isn't somehow imaginary as well, the erotic daydream of a wife who is dismayed that middle age hasn't increased her desirability (in her mind, at least) the way it has her husband's. Even the plot's dark turns can be read as Catherine working through her own guilty feelings over accusing her husband of cheating, and her concerns about her son being sexually active in their house.

Granted, there is little on-screen to support the idea that Chloe is a Tyler Durden-esque manifestation of Catherine's sexually repressed subconscious. What we see is by all accounts actually happening in the story. But the idea of an imaginary Chloe goes a long way toward explaining the film's epilogue, as the Stewarts hold a graduation party for Max and his friends. Everyone seems to be having a wonderful time, despite the fact that a sex worker died under grisly and mysterious circumstances in that house just months before. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that Catherine could realistically sweep under the rug, yet life seems to have gone on perfectly well for all of them after Chloe's death.

Renting vs. buying

There is of course another, more cynical explanation as to why Chloe's death seems to have had so little impact on the Stewarts' lives: They are wealthy, and Chloe, despite her glamorous appearance, was not. The Stewarts' lifestyle is steeped in material comforts, from their ultramodern home to Catherine's upscale medical practice to Max's no doubt expensive private schooling. Chloe, too, enjoys fancy clothes and restaurants — an illusion of wealth that her upper-class clients demand. But the illegal nature of her work means that she forever exists on the margins of society, and lives or dies (literally) at the whims of her clients.

Catherine, her final client, thinks that she is different from the men who use women like Chloe. But after her emotional breakdown and night of passion, she forcefully and cruelly reaffirms the transactional nature of their relationship. This was a business deal, nothing more, no matter what either of them might have felt at the moment. At the end of the day, Catherine was nothing more than just another John, renting pleasure by the hour and taking no ownership over the effect she had on another human being. The privilege that allowed her to pay for Chloe in the first place also allowed her to pretend that she wasn't a real person. After her death, Chloe is remembered as a marital aid and nothing more.

Critics didn't buy the third-act twist

Bolstered by a steamy premise and the combined star power of Moore, Neeson, and Seyfried (who was just 23 at the time), "Chloe" remains Egoyan's highest-grossing film to date, with a worldwide box office gross of just over $13 million. Critics, however, were for the most part either indifferent or actively hostile toward the film, which contains many of the filmmaker's pet themes, but in presentation and style feels lightyears away from his previous indie hits "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter." Several critics — including former New York mayor Ed Koch of all people, writing for The Atlantic — pointed out how the film's third act swerve into thriller territory unflatteringly recalls "Fatal Attraction." Writer Adam Nayman, in a 2020 retrospective for Criterion , notes that the film was released in the midst of a critical backlash against former indie darling Egoyan. He doesn't defend the film necessarily, but notes that its "fashionably upscale" style was like "a target on the movie's back."

Still, the film had some notable fans. Toronto Star critic Peter Howell was enjoyably scandalized by the way the film turned his and Egoyan's chilly hometown into "a hotbed of illicit lust." Roger Ebert's three-and-a-half star review for the Chicago Sun-Times praised the film while taking issue with those who might be unsatisfied with the ending. "Is it arbitrary?" he writes. "Most of life's conclusions are arbitrary ... It's not the kind of movie that depends on the certainty of an ending. It's more about how things continue."

What has the cast and crew said about the ending?

In a 2010 interview for The Rumpus , Egoyan states that as much as his films are often up to interpretation, he sees Catherine as the clear villain of "Chloe." It is her need for control, to be the one in charge of not only her own life but her husband's and son's as well, that sets the tragic plot in motion. "She's making a very strange decision," he admits. "If you need to prove that someone is having an affair, there are other ways of going about it than hiring a prostitute." That extreme need for control is the key to all of Catherine's actions, including the final image of her wearing Chloe's hairpin. "The last image of the film is very provocative ... Is it a way of remembering Chloe? Or is it a way of ultimately asserting control. These are open to interpretation."

Writer Jeffrey Edalatpour points out in this interview that as much as "Chloe" is officially based on "Nathalie..." the remake actually bears more resemblance to Pier Paolo Passolini's 1968 drama "Teorema," in which a mysterious, possibly supernatural visitor (Terence Stamp) seduces an entire bourgeois Italian family and then disappears, leaving them to reckon with their actions. He sees the way Egoyan stages Chloe's death, floating to the ground in slow motion like a "fallen angel" as further proof that her presence in the Stewarts' lives is meant to be a wake-up call, or even a punishment, for their decadent lifestyle. Egoyan cops to being an admirer of the Passolini film, but says that any resemblance was subconscious.

The film's haunting alternate endings

Though the theatrical release keeps the final images of Catherine and her family somewhat ambiguous, it wasn't always that way. There were in fact two different alternate endings to the film that shed light — perhaps too much light — on what the story "means," if anything. Visually, the endings are the same as what we see in the final cut: A montage of David comforting Catherine as paramedics take Chloe's body away, and finally the graduation party months later. But in one alternate ending, those images are accompanied by a monologue by Chloe from beyond the grave. She admits that she let go of the window frame intentionally, as a way to connect herself to Catherine forever, to transcend the temporary nature of the sex worker-client relationship, and to embed herself into another person's life.

The other alternate ending features a monologue by Catherine instead. "She could have saved herself," she says of Chloe, "but instead she saved me." Catherine's words sound grateful, and frame the hairpin at the end as a tribute. But at the same time, it's terribly myopic — if not sociopathic — to see someone else's death only in terms of how it benefited you. Catherine's monologue goes a long way to proving Egoyan's thesis that she is the villain of the film, but ultimately both monologues put too neat of a bow on the ending, prescribing meaning when it is better for the audience to decide for themselves.

What has the cast and crew done since Chloe?

In the years since "Chloe," its stars have kept on being movie stars. Moore won an Emmy in 2012 for playing Sarah Palin in the HBO movie "Game Change," and an Oscar in 2015 for "Still Alice." Seyfried has built an eclectic resume, bouncing from prestige films like David Fincher's "Mank" (for which she was nominated for an Oscar) and the Hulu series "The Dropout" (for which she won an Emmy) to being a repertory player for Seth MacFarlane in "A Million Ways to Die in the West" and the "Ted" films. And while adult dramas like "Chloe" used to be Neeson's bread and butter, it was a role he took the year before, as a vengeful father in "Taken," that would change the course of his career. These days he is arguably as well known for " ass-kicking dad " roles like "Non-Stop" and "A Walk Among the Tombstones" as he is for his sensitive turns in "Schindler's List" or "Husbands and Wives."

Wilson's post-"Chloe" writing has included the domestic drama "Men, Women, and Children" and the adaptation of Paula Hawkins' novel "The Girl on the Train." She is also a credited writer on Disney's upcoming live-action remake of "Snow White" starring Rachel Zegler. Egoyan, meanwhile, has kept busy on both stage and screen, directing the docudrama "Devil's Knot" starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon, as well as a digital adaptation of "Bluebeard's Castle" by Bartok for the Canadian Opera Company in 2022. In 2023, he reunited with Seyfried for the theatrical drama " Seven Veils ."

• Entertainment
• Amazon’s Psychological Thriller <em>Chloe</em> Is a Riveting Twist on the Scammer Show

Amazon’s Psychological Thriller Chloe Is a Riveting Twist on the Scammer Show

B ecky Green doesn’t want to be Becky Green anymore. And who could blame her? The protagonist of Chloe, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is a study in abjection. Played with protean inscrutability by Erin Doherty ( The Crown ’s Princess Anne), Becky works a demeaning temp job and lives in a shabby apartment with a mother (Lisa Palfrey) who’s sinking into early-onset dementia. Social media is her escape. She scrolls endlessly through posts by a childhood friend, Chloe Fairbourne (Poppy Gilbert), who lives a glamorous life surrounded by her ascendant-politician husband (Billy Howle) and a tight clique of photogenic bourgeois-bohemian pals.

Then Chloe dies, in an apparent suicide, and Becky discovers that one of the last things her estranged pal did was try to call. Using internet research to fake her way into fancy events, Becky reinvents herself as Sasha Miles, an art-world type fresh off a stint in Tokyo, and infiltrates her late friend’s inner circle. In this perfectly paced psychological thriller, all it takes to blend in is a posh accent, keen social media stalking skills, and a lot of nerve.

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Will Becky get found out? The suspense generated by that question alone would be enough to propel viewers through the show’s six tightly edited episodes. What elevates Chloe above the typical prestige mystery is the care it takes in concealing not just the events of the title character’s final night on earth, but also Becky’s own motives. Is she investigating Chloe’s death, or is she indulging a long-running fantasy of becoming Chloe? Is she a heartless opportunist, or is she simply a broken person seeking justice in the only way she knows how?

The story takes some genuinely unexpected, yet never ridiculous, turns, each one grounded in Becky’s evolving relationships with Howle’s Elliot, Chloe’s queen-bee best friend Livia (Pippa Bennett-Warner), and their musician buddy Richard (Jack Farthing), who seems to be grieving more intensely than anyone. The result is an unusually human grifter story. Instead of diving into the trite subject of sociopathic behavior, like Inventing Anna or Dirty John , Chloe finds depth, authenticity, and even compassion in its profile of a scammer.

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‘Chloe’ Review: Sharp Psychological Drama Stands Out in a Field of 2022 TV Grifter Shows

Steve greene.

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As has been pointed many times so far this year, 2022 has been a treasure trove for stories about con artists. In the TV world, spring brought plenty of stories chronicling how people in the recent past have hoodwinked their way to enormous wealth and cultural cachet purely by virtue of lulling the right people into a false sense of security. Of course, 2010s tech and entrepreneurial climbers do not have a monopoly on grift, in worlds either real or fictional.

Premiering in the UK back on February and arriving on Prime Video this week, the new psychological drama “ Chloe ” makes the perfect (and in some ways, necessary) bookend to a half-year trend of people tricking themselves into situations far greater than they imagined.

Much like those other stories, “Chloe” begins on a humble scale. Becky Green (Erin Doherty) spends her idle moments scrolling social media, in whatever time she has in between taking care of her ailing mother and working at a series of temp jobs. Headphones in and with the dead-eyed look of someone whose app habits make them lose complete track of time, Becky seems especially taken with the profile of a Chloe Fairbourne (Poppy Gilbert). The opening scenes of the series are peppered with Chloe’s tasteful selfies, lively dinner parties, planned-candid moments with gorgeous acquaintances.

Sensing an opportunity at her new gig, Becky decides to use some key intel to crash a fancy gala. It’s there that Becky kicks off an unending string of tiny lies and manufactured credentials. Soon she finds her escaping into an entire alternate life as Sasha, who she tells new would-be colleagues has been all around the world working as a well-connected live events coordinator. When Becky discovers through her usual online routine that Chloe has been found dead, the newfound confidence to remake herself in the image of her obsession puts her in a position for Sasha to step right into Chloe’s inner circle.

“Person ingratiates themselves in a group by pretending to be someone else” has a long tradition in fiction, but “Chloe” writer/director Alice Seabright understands that the most important element in a story like this is clarity. There’s a simplicity and efficiency in the way she sets all the disparate pieces in motion here. Becky’s slow construction of Sasha is as diligent and meticulous as the show itself, done through small-scale manipulations of front-desk workers and assistants. Though the gap between where she starts and ultimately ends up is purposely jarring, none of the steps in between — art installations, yoga sessions, impromptu heart-to-hearts over glasses of expensive wine — require a herculean effort to justify.

In the process, “Chloe” is as attuned to Becky as the clique she’s trying to infiltrate. Chloe’s widower Elliot (Billy Howle) is trying to figure out how to balance his grief with a potential run for public office. Best friend Livia (Pippa Bennett-Warner) still gets visibly shaken by the mere sight or mention of Chloe. Fellow art world denizen Josh (Brandon Michael Hall) and friend group wild card Richard (Jack Farthing) are skeptical of Sasha’s sudden appearance, introducing the idea early on in “Chloe” that Becky’s task here comes with constant hurdles.

Rather than gawk at how masterfully Becky slowly slips comfortably inside a world she’s only ever seen from afar, Seabright frames all her actions as far more matter-of-fact. In tandem with Doherty’s sharply calibrated performance, Sasha becomes more of a constant logistical puzzle rather than a ruse with virtuosic flourishes. The occasional peeks into Becky’s pre-Sasha life are marked by disappointment and insecurity and self-doubt. One of the skillful elements of “Chloe” is keeping all of that second-guessing present, even as she’s capably explaining away inconsistencies in Sasha’s made-up biography.

“Chloe” mirrors those misgivings with some structural ambiguity. The more that Becky’s time as Sasha becomes an excuse to do some amateur detective work, the more that her intrusive thoughts bleed into what the audience is taking in, too. Becky’s daydreams and nightmares are marked by imagined phone calls and theoretical situations of peril, all threatening to crack this neatly-lain facade she’s managed to get some new friends to accept as genuine. They’re all part of the overall tapestry of “Chloe,” which also features a handful of exquisitely mischievous scene transitions as Becky ventures from place to place.

Maybe most integral to the success of “Chloe” is the way it taps into an almost universal desire to be understood and valued. Becky gets much further into her plan of living inside Chloe’s life than she could have imagined, but it’s not because Doherty is playing her as a paragon of charm and refinement. There are times when Becky gets careless, overlooks a Sasha detail that puts her in peril. But “Chloe” does show how powerful it is to have someone come into your life as an active force for friendship. It’s easy to rationalize some odd questions and coincidences when the source of them is someone eager to fill a void with a helping hand. Tiny kindnesses, whatever the intention, add up quickly.

All of it is filtered through Becky’s perspective, with Seabright sometimes putting the audience directly in her sightline. It’s then all the more unsettling as Becky starts to lose her tether to who she is, what she’s doing, and why she continues down the path she’s set out on. This is not a tale of brute force determination. There’s a delicacy and a slipperiness here that feels organic to the story of a person trying to assert some control in an otherwise volatile life. “Chloe” eventually coalesces around the Chloe friend group, showing how each of them, despite their outward demeanors and the photographic evidence in that feed, are gripped by some of the same doubt that Becky has.

These swirling tests of loyalty and honesty would be shallow without a firm trajectory of what Becky’s decisions mean for everyone involved. But Seabright — along with fellow series director Amanda Boyle and writers Kayleigh Llewellyn and Poppy Cogan — chooses not to dabble too much in the artificial, despite the premise of the series. Against a wave of similar shows that luxuriate in the lies, each incremental step away from the truth in “Chloe” carries a real, sobering weight with it.

“Chloe” is now available to stream on Prime Video.

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• Common Sense Says
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Common Sense Media Review

Drama about sex, deception too creepy, explicit for teens.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Chloe is an adults-only tale of sex, betrayal, deception, and obsession. Teens might be interested in seeing the red-hot Amanda Seyfried ( Mamma Mia! , Jennifer's Body , Dear John ), who appears partly naked here, in her first grown-up role, but families should beware:…

Why Age 18+?

One character, Chloe, has sex with multiple partners. We get plenty of kissing,

The movie contains strong adult language, but not constantly. We hear more than

The movie has some mild verbal confrontations and one medium-violent struggle wi

Adults drink in social situations, at parties or gatherings, and mostly wine. On

Not an issue.

Any Positive Content?

While the movie's ultimate message is that open, honest communication is key in

The movie has no real role models. Though none of the four main characters are a

Sex, Romance & Nudity

One character, Chloe, has sex with multiple partners. We get plenty of kissing, flirting, and frank talk about sex and sexuality. There is infidelity, manipulation, and mistrust and a general air of illicit seduction and sex throughout. The movie has two explicit sex scenes, including partial nudity: one between Chloe and another, older woman, and another between Chloe and a young man her own age.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

The movie contains strong adult language, but not constantly. We hear more than one use of "f--k," plus "s--t" and "Jesus"used as an exclamation, and references to sex, sexual organs, and sex acts.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

The movie has some mild verbal confrontations and one medium-violent struggle with a shocking conclusion.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink in social situations, at parties or gatherings, and mostly wine. One character receives a bottle of fine scotch as a birthday present and he drinks a small sample glass, just to taste.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Positive messages.

While the movie's ultimate message is that open, honest communication is key in a marriage and/or family situation, the characters put themselves through some very tough and deceitful times to avoid communication (and possibly uncovering painful truths). But when the characters finally do communicate, they discover that things aren't as bad as they imagined.

Positive Role Models

The movie has no real role models. Though none of the four main characters are actually bad people, they do not behave in a responsible or constructive way. Chloe seems to have fallen genuinely in love, but takes all the wrong steps toward winning that person's heart. Catherine does not trust her husband and employs a sneaky, dangerous plan rather than talking to him. Her husband David is equally guilty of not communicating, as is her teenage son Michael. Ironically, Chloe is the one who comes across as the most responsible, at first, but looks can be deceiving.

Parents need to know that Chloe is an adults-only tale of sex, betrayal, deception, and obsession. Teens might be interested in seeing the red-hot Amanda Seyfried ( Mamma Mia! , Jennifer's Body , Dear John ), who appears partly naked here, in her first grown-up role, but families should beware: The movie is extremely frank with its sex scenes (including one between two women) and sex talk, and there is some strong language (including "f--k" and "s--t"), though drinking and violence are mild. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (5)
• Kids say (10)

Based on 5 parent reviews

Great Movie For Adults

What's the story.

Gynecologist Catherine Stewart ( Julianne Moore ) suspects her professor husband ( Liam Neeson ) of having an affair (or affairs) with his female students, so she hires a pretty young girl, Chloe ( Amanda Seyfried ), to seduce her husband and prove her suspicions. Chloe meets with Catherine to give her reports, and subtly tries to seduce the older woman and eventually succeeds. When Catherine subsequently rejects her, Chloe has sex with Catherine's teenage son Michael ( Max Thieriot ), as a way of "getting closer" to Catherine. Things grow dangerously out of hand as Chloe becomes more and more obsessed and unhinged.

Is It Any Good?

The strong characters and director Atom Egoyan's patient, thoughtful mood and pacing make this an above-average effort. The Canada-based, Oscar-nominated Egoyan has plenty of experience with adult dramas about sex, including Exotica (1995) and Where the Truth Lies (2005), and his new CHLOE -- which is a remake of the 2003 French film Nathalie -- comes with his usual brand of chilly intelligence and maturity. The four characters behave and relate to one another in emotionally realistic ways, and the fatal lack of communication that leads to their troubles seems painfully genuine.

Where the movie goes slightly wrong is in the thriller portion, wherein the Chloe character behaves more and more irrationally, out of love and/or obsession for Catherine. Her obsession turns homicidal, and the final act of the movie becomes an almost standard-issue Hollywood erotic thriller. Not to mention the odd coincidences that bring all these characters together.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how the lack of communication drives a wedge in between these family members. Which makes more sense: to sneak around and find evidence, or to talk openly? Which is more difficult? Why? Do the communication difficulties in the movie reflect those in your family? What can you do to improve family communication?

What lessons about sex does this movie teach, if any? Do you think the movie portrays realistic intimacy between adults? If teens fans of Amanda Seyfried see the movie: Does seeing her in this adult role change the way you think about her? Do you like her more or less? Why?

Is Chloe a bad person? Is she crazy, or just in love?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 26, 2010
• On DVD or streaming : July 13, 2010
• Cast : Amanda Seyfried , Julianne Moore , Liam Neeson
• Director : Atom Egoyan
• Inclusion Information : Middle Eastern/North African directors, Female actors
• Studio : Sony Pictures Classics
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 96 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong sexual content including graphic dialogue, nudity and language
• Last updated : August 5, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

It’s fun to see robots blowing each other up, get a cheap scare from a horror movie or a good laugh out of a comedy, but no sensation can compare to that of a dissonant drama with the power to feel real. Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried provide Erin Cressida Wilson’s script with an intense breath of authenticity guaranteeing you feel the pain inflicted upon their characters by the plot’s extreme circumstances. Making Chloe even more potent, those conditions are especially unnerving.

Catherine (Julianne Moore) has a pleasant life. Her son’s ( Max Thieriot ) in the midst of a rebellious stage, but otherwise, thing are going quite well. She lives in a beautiful home and has a successful gynecological practice. But that all changes when her husband ( Liam Neeson ) ‘misses’ his flight home, causing her to suspect he’s cheating on him. A chance encounter with a call girl, Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), leads her to make an arrangement for Chloe to meet with David in order to see if he’s as dubious as she suspects.

Chloe proceeds as told and continuously convenes with David and reports back to Catherine with the extremely descriptive juicy details. Turns out, this is far more than Catherine bargained for. While struggling with the new reality and her own out-of-character desires, she watches helplessly as her life crumbles around her and is forced to question the things she thought she loved.

Now that’s putting it mildly. Chloe is intense in every sense of the word. From the moment the film begins, Moore is oozing with emotion. Everything from her dialogue down to her facial expressions conveys the deep suffering her character is enduring. Then, there’s Seyfried who successfully shows yet another type of character she has the ability to portray. Chloe is as far from Karen in Mean Girls , Sophie in Mamma Mia ! and Needy in Jennifer’s Body as you can get. Despite her questionable occupation, Seyfried instantly establishes a sense of trust and endearment making Chloe inquisitively likeable.

It’s not Moore’s chemistry with Neeson nor Seyfried’s connection to the leading man (if that’s the way you suspect the story turns) that holds the most weight. The most pressing relationship is the one between Catherine and Chloe and that affiliation takes on many forms. What begins as a business arrangement slowly becomes more as Moore’s character warms up to Seyfried’s. From there, it’s peppered with a hint of aversion as Catherine tries to come to terms with Chloe’s excessive persistence towards both her husband and herself.

Catherine’s relationship with Chloe isn’t the film’s only chameleon. As Chloe’s pushiness grows more trying, the movie itself develops into a bit of a thriller. Director Atom Egoyan successfully takes a mildly disconcerting notion and builds upon it into a downright troubling situation. Catherine’s situation is growing graver and you can feel it. By the time the film reaches its pinnacle, it’s become an edge-of-the-seat thriller sans action.

Unfortunately, some may catch on rather quickly, tarnishing the effect of the ever-increasing anxiety. But what gives Chloe a shot, even for the moviegoer that attempts to stay a step ahead, is that it doesn’t solely rely on its big reveals. In fact, at times, knowing what’s coming and having the time to fully digest the eeriness of the situation only adds to the aftermath.

These off-putting occurrences keep Chloe from being favorable, but the film is still immensely likable as a curious story that effectively creates a desperation to know how it ends. This permits Egoyan to bend the rules and color outside the lines. At times, this extra effort fails, but a pre-established interest brings the audience back for more. Failed moments like an ineffective scene during which Catherine dines with a group of girlfriends, are like commercials during a great TV show; they hold no bearing and once the viewer joins the story, it’s like he or she never left.

Staff Writer for CinemaBlend.

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Architecture at the Movies: Chloe

How did the production crew come to choose your house?

The aptly-named Ravine House sits at the edge of a ravine, a nod to the wildness at the gates, a notion reinforced in the scenes where Chloe waits outside the house.

I met the director during shooting. Egoyan is friendly with a colleague of mine, they sat on a board together or something, and he told my friend that he was looking for a modern ravine house to use for the film. He wanted a ravine house to suggest a kind of precipice of civilization, to get this kind of wildness in the domestic sphere. He was presented with three options and the one I designed made the most sense.

Architect Stephen Teeple's Heathdale House, just down the street from Mandel's Ravine House, was used as the exterior of the Stewart family home in Chloe.

This might be overly picky, but based on what I saw of the Ravine House on your website and in the film, I'm not totally convinced that the facade that the we see in the film--when Chloe and Catherine arrive at the house by taxi--is the same as the one you designed. Good eye; it's not. It's funny because the filmmakers were really interested in continuity and getting all the details right, but in this case they chose a house down the street by another local architect Stephen Teeple [The Heathdale House] because the owners of the Ravine House are very private and didn't want the front of their house in the movie. They have a nice art collection and though they were happy the home was in the movie, they wanted an element of it to remain private. Considering how often Toronto stands in for other cities in films, it's rare to see it stand rather proudly as Toronto. Chole makes nice use of local landmarks, and not just bars and restaurants, though you do see those, but also the iconic architecture of Toronto. I can think of one shot, a close-up of Chloe on the street, and Frank Gehry's Art Gallery of Ontario and Will Alsop's Ontario College of Art and Design is hovering over that. Nice stuff, and clearly not a stand-in for New York or Chicago.

Here Egoyan captures Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) through the various glass planes in the house. A sense of hovering doom pervades the film; only bad things happen once you get upstairs.

There's also a nice shot of the addition to the Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind in one shot too. I think this film is really a celebration of Toronto. The director was quite enthusiastic about that element of things, and this is also the first foreign-financed film set explicitly in Toronto. I was talking with a friend and we were trying to name all the non-Canadian films we could think of that were purposely set in Toronto and I think we came up with two: a film from the 70s with Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould whose name I can't recall and then there are a couple iconic Toronto buildings in Cronenberg's The Fly. It's funny, it was a very personal film for me, clearly because one of my houses was in it so prominently, but also because of how Toronto was portrayed. I saw the film when it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival opening night and people asked me if I liked it, and to be honest, I was kind of distracted. I like and live near and go to a lot of the places in the film. I think it also treats the architecture of the city as a character, and it shows the architectural maturity of the city. At the same time, the film does make use of that hoary old trope that unhappy people live in modernist houses. I remember whispering to my wife in the theater, "You see all that glass in this house, these people are bound to have problems."

This shot of the Ravine House's interior shows its glazed back facade and clear geometry.

Yeah, I can see that, but I wasn't heartbroken or anything. I live in a happy little world with people who want to make nice houses. I do think Atom Egoyan did think it was an interesting house, and he's truly interested in modern architecture. Though once I thought about it for a while I can see how he wanted the glass, and all those shots through the glass, to suggest a kind of isolation, or emotional alienation. You're right though, that troubled people always get put in modern homes in the movies. I've never done a house for a super-villain, though. Actually, I'd bet a super-villian would be a great client!

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When a mission goes pear-shaped, a covert operative (Halle Berry) turns to a secret weapon: her high school boyfriend (Mark Wahlberg).

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By Ben Kenigsberg

The “Mission: Impossible” series went missing in action this summer , but that’s no reason to settle for Netflix’s “The Union,” a depressing illustration of the wisdom that sometimes you shouldn’t buy — or stream — generic. The movie combines a catalog of elements from the Tom Cruise franchise (supersecret agents, exotic locales, stunts) with a high-concept twist so silly it might as well have been selected by A.I.: What if — hear this out — the lead operatives happened to be former high school sweethearts?

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