Chloe

What it's about:

Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) is a successful doctor and is married to an equally successful university professor, David (Liam Neeson) whose job frequently takes him out of the country. Catherine begins to suspect that David is having an affair and hires a call girl named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce her husband to test his fidelity. Passions start to stir during Catherine and Chloe's frequent meetings to discuss David and the women are caught up in an affair of their own.

What we thought:

You've no doubt been drawn in by Chloe's tantalizing premise. And how could you not? It promises heaving sexual tension between two women, and stunning ones at that. That's already half the work of the movie done, and much of its success hinges on just how hot under the collar the mounting sexual tension between the characters gets you.

Moore plays Catherine as a brittle woman who senses her connection with her flirtatious husband is slipping away as he grows more handsome with each year, leading a dynamic life being fawned over by his young, nubile students, while she has to battle to maintain a relationship with her moody teenage son. It's an all-too familiar scenario.

In the hands of acclaimed Canadian director Atom Egoyan, this soapy storyline gets a moody, sophisticated treatment that makes full use of its beautiful cast and lavish sets. Egoyan patiently teases out the burgeoning passions that arise between the seductive Chloe who meets up with a desperate Catherine to report back – in titillating detail – on her trysts with David. And this is when the film feels like its going somewhere intriguing, namely seeing Catherine finally giving in to Chloe's come-ons.

When that finally happens, you might feel awkward enough to shift in your seat and avoid eye contact with the rest of the audience in the cinema because it is raunchy, kinky, exhilarating stuff. As far as memorable erotic scenes go, Moore and Seyfried's bedroom adventure rates pretty high. However, once the film achieves its, ahem, climax, it loses steam and follows conventional domestic  thriller patterns that are a bit too reminiscent of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female. In other words, it's the 1990s all over again, and women's fears of ageing and abandonment don’t seem to have changed either.

Seyfried's Chloe – whose beauty and wide-eyed innocence will no doubt raise a few temperatures – becomes ever more insipid as the film progress, which is never a good look for an antagonist. And even more tragically, the final third heads down a predictable, inevitable road that will leave you wondering why you cared so much about these people in the first place.

Which is probably to Chloe's withering credit – it's a bewitching experience.