About the smooth-flowing tracking shots inside what appears to be a seamy and enchanted grotto, with all the buttery and naked flesh that accumulates in this kind of establishment, not much need be said. Sumptuous and apparently sexy—it was first marketed as a titillating thriller—Exotica takes on the suggestive challenge of a strip club and all its associated stereotypes and layers its script and plot with one emotional revelation after another, changing what we’ve seen with a retroactive yank like the most exciting thrillers.
But Exotica is more than a thriller. Its slow revelations not only unsettle but stir the viewer to a reevaluation. The seamy nighttime Toronto of the setting is not merely seamy, and the characters are not just the corrupt inhabitants of a nightmare land—they are so much more, as we discover with the dewy and unfurling petals of the movie’s humanity, which never stops coming to life even as it appears deadened, cynical, and vaguely absurd. I was wondering about the utter lack of humor.
His hermetic and obsessive existence like a noxious but peculiar side dish at a restaurant whose slutty and unsettling neon signs should have warned us before we entered, suggested to us by a well-meaning waiter who betrays a hint of disdain, Thomas is the pet-shop owner and a smuggler of rare bird eggs that flag the unwanted attentions of our protagonist, Francis. The role of Thomas in Exotica matches the strangeness of his character, remaining the odd man out among those that are directly connected with the tragedy of Francis’ family. His buildup as a character is subtly sinister, and I couldn’t help wanting more than tax-auditor espionage from the time spent on his romantic forays.
He takes part in an abortive murder plot, to be sure, but his participation is coerced and the slightly batty bookishness that seemed to suggest something in his character, a kind of darkness waiting to reveal itself, merely fizzled out in a tepid and soft and flaccid compliance. Ahem.
The movie is otherwise resonant as its threads of morbid guilt and regret pathologies intertwine, and the ending reveals more than its share of twisty turns and a so-called shocker that, all told, is no more than an emotional deepening of a central relationship in the story.
This, by building up this central relationship with some freeform strip-club fantasies and Freudian role-playing, was maybe undermining its credibility—I found at times unconvincing what this man was uttering, even after the retrospective reevaluation at the end of the movie—but it is a small bone to pick, and the final emotional impression carries enough weight to leave me staring at the screen in a moment of arrested watching as the girl, Christina, retreats step by step to her benignly sinister house in this suburbia of a dream. And, alas, some dreams do come true.
