Noah (Elias Koteas) is an insurance adjuster. He sleeps with ladies who suffered lost and Arianne (Jennifer Dale) is the latest one who lost her home to fire. His wife Hera (Arsinée Khanjian) watches movies for the Board of Censors and she secretly films the most brutal. They have a son with Hera's sister are the only ones living in one of the model homes in an undeveloped field. Tyler (Don McKellar) is a new reviewer for the Censors. Bubba (Maury Chaykin) is a pornographer who's interested in Noah's house. There is also a sex pervert stalker.I'm not sure what Atom Egoyan is trying to get at other than bring together a lot of the characters' dark side. The quest for a plot is left to the audience. It's a movie with a theme more than a story. One can really debate the point of each character and their significance. It's great to use modern sexual perversion as a launching off point but I like a story that moves more. It's a bit too slow and therefore feels repetitive with pregnant pauses. It's a movie that feels like it's saying something although I'll be damned if I know exactly what that is.

Anyone who praises this film is kidding themselves. I can't recall ever seeing a film that has aged worse than this. The Adjuster isn't the worst movie I've seen, but it is a completely unintelligible and dull exercise in abstractions, and that's putting it kindly. I can normally enjoy or at least appreciate foreign films, old films, and even experimental films, but I found this film to be extremely inaccessible. It's the kind of thing some no-talent film student would make who wanted to be avant-garde, but who knew next to nothing about constructing a story. It's not just boring; it's so poorly-done, that when it's over, you're just in disbelief that anyone is capable of making something that is such a complete waste of time.

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan redefines the black comic satire of his earlier films ('Family Viewing', 'Speaking Parts'), but for all its dark wit and visual sophistication the effort doesn't add up to anything more than a cast of unattractive characters in search of a plot. These include, in ascending order of eccentricity: a handsome insurance agent who uses his control over the victims of catastrophe for sexual favors; his wife, a government film censor who secretly bootlegs violent porn movies for her apathetic sister; a filthy rich couple with a fetish for enacting elaborate exhibitionist fantasies; and so forth. The film is disturbing, perverse, sporadically funny, and totally original, bit also inscrutable to the point of confusion: it gives the impression of depth without clearly saying much about anything at all. Egoyan is a filmmaker of obvious and distinctive talents, but he needs (once again) to build a stronger story around his strange characters.

Even those who worship at the altar of Egoyan would probably admit The Adjuster needed a bit of, er, adjusting. The first half an hour of the film is so disjointed and gives so little information it's comical, almost like a parody of his later work. Of course, this movie came before Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter and is really only useful to those who enjoyed those films as an exercise to see where Egoyan came from. And it goes to prove that no one, not Egoyan, not Scorsese, not Spielberg, made their best pictures straight out of the gate. The Adjuster has many of Egoyan's signatures — explorations of photographic voyeurism, depraved sexuality, his wife — but in The Adjuster he forgets to cross his Ts and dot his Is. The editing is particularly jarring, with little flow within scenes and jerky transitions between story lines. There are some interesting images, especially of the model home in the middle of nowhere and an interesting contrast between suburbia and the urban motel where Elias Koteas' character houses his clients/victims. Egoyan deserves credit for pioneering this style of dreary, detached storytelling, which like it or not is truly original. Of course, he is also responsible for the clones who have copied this style (Last Night, Century Hotel, The Five Senses) to less-than-desirable results and given Canada the reputation of precious alternof---s. No, really, we're normal people who don't all have cold sex.