SOURCE: “Exploitations,” in Sight & Sound, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1995, pp. 6–8.

In the following review, Romney offers a negative assessment of Exotica, criticizing Egoyan's style of filmmaking as unfulfilling.

Atom Egoyan makes bitterly disappointing films. They begin by stirring our curiosity—our desire to play detective or analyst, or simply our prurient longing for a glimpse of the louche, the exotic. And when finally they deliver what we're looking for, they invariably frustrate us—all we discover is that revelation can never be satisfactory. We learn that there are always more layers to the onion, or that it was never really an onion in the first place. As Egoyan's new film Exotica makes explicit, this director's work resembles the consummate art of male frustration that is striptease—we await the moment of laying bare only to have it dawn on us that the body is the one thing we don't...