The Adjuster (1991)

Widely regarded as a pivotal early film in Egoyan’s career, The Adjuster unfolds as a disquieting character study, following Noah (Elias Koteas), an insurance agent whose attempts to guide people through moments of crisis gradually erode the line between compassion and intrusion. Living with his wife Hera (Arsinée Khanjian), their son Simon (Armen Kokorian), and Hera’s sister Seta (Rose Sarkisyan), Noah wades through a suburban landscape where emotional distance and perplexing coping mechanisms shape the lives around him.

Into this already fragile environment drifts Bubba (Maury Chaykin), a figure whose eccentricities and boundary-testing behavior introduce a new layer of instability. His arrival amplifies the film’s sense of disorientation, embodying the way Egoyan’s world allows strangers to slip into intimate spaces and unsettle whatever equilibrium the characters think they’ve achieved.

A central tension running through The Adjuster is Egoyan’s fascination with the duality of intimacy and detachment, how people can be physically close yet emotionally remote, or conversely, how they can appear to be close without ever truly connecting. Noah embodies this contradiction: his job places him inside the private lives of people in crisis, offering comfort that feels genuine on the surface yet carries an unmistakable sense of ritual, even performance. Hera mirrors this dynamic in a different way. As a film censor, she is exposed to raw, unsettling imagery, but her role demands a clinical neutrality that blunts any emotional response. Both characters navigate other people’s trauma at a step removed, their professions creating a buffer that protects them from the very intimacy they seem to offer. Bubba’s arrival destabilizes this balance, pushing the film toward a space where boundaries blur and the veneer of emotional control begins to slip.

This interplay between closeness and distance is a hallmark of Egoyan’s work, surfacing in films like Family Viewing (1987), Calendar (1993), and Exotica (1994), where characters mediate experience through technology, bureaucracy, or ritual. Egoyan seems drawn to the ways modern life encourages us to observe rather than engage, to manage emotions rather than express them. In The Adjuster, this theme becomes especially potent: the characters’ attempts to connect are shaped – and often distorted – by the very structures meant to support them. The result is a portrait of intimacy that is both sought after and feared, a fragile negotiation between the desire to be seen and the instinct to remain hidden.