‘The Adjuster’ Is a Psychosexual Baptism by Fire [Maple Syrup Massacre]

Maple Syrup Massacre is an editorial series where Joe Lipsett dissects the themes, conventions and contributions of new and classic Canadian horror films. Spoilers follow…

It would be disingenuous to suggest that Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster is a horror film.

Psychological thriller is more apt descriptor, though audiences seeking scary set pieces will walk away unsatisfied. Despite this, The Adjuster has a narrative of thriller tropes, including a large number of psychosexual relationships, characters adopting dual roles (or simply role playing) and an ending that encourages audiences to re-evaluate what they have seen.

Egoyan is one of Canada’s most significant contemporary directors, though internationally his work is known principally in art cinema and film festival circles. In the 90s, Egoyan was a symbol of national pride; he, along with David Cronenberg, was essentially the face of English-language Canadian film. His most famous film is the Sarah Polley-starring The Sweet Hereafter, which was nominated for two Oscars in 1998 (one for Best Director and one for Best Adapted Screenplay).

1991’s The Adjuster is his fourth film and the one that put him on the map as a significant talent to look out for.

Written and directed by Egoyan, the film stars Elias Koteas (Shutter Island) as Noah Render, an insurance adjuster who goes to great lengths for his job. He not only comforts the victims of house fires, he puts them all up in the same motel, and even sleeps with them (male and female).

Noah is married to Hera (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s real-life wife), an Armenian refugee who works as a film censor. Just as Noah has his own “private life,” so too does Hera: she covertly records the violent, sexual content of the films and screens them for her sister Seta (Rose Sarkisyan).

Then there’s rich married couple Bubba (Maury Chaykin, Of Unknown Origin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose, Grace), whose lives are seemingly dedicated to kinky role playing. They’re introduced on the subway, where Hera sees Mimi use Bubba, who is dressed as an unhoused, mentally-ill man, to finger herself in public. Later Mimi dresses as a cheerleader who is ravaged by football players while her cuck husband films the encounter.

Although the film has a unhurried, dream-like plot, the lives of these characters become intertwined when Bubba happens upon the Render house and asks to rent it for a week to film another salacious film with his wife. This displaces Noah, Hera, their young son and Seta, forcing them to move into the motel alongside all of his clients.

Written out in this form, The Adjuster reads like a cross between a porno and sex, lies and videotape, but like Egoyan’s other films, it is really about the secret lives of extremely damaged people. Tragedy looms large over nearly every character and while there is a certain amount of sex, the sexual interactions – much like the lies the characters tell – are a form of trauma-response. Characters struggle deeply to connect, often resorting to films or sex rather than words to negotiate their relationships with others.

These are common themes within Egoyan’s work: his films are filled with characters who adopt a false identity in order to seek out connections, all the while holding the truth (and therefore genuine relationships) at arm’s length. Canadian film scholar Tom McSorley even wrote an entire book on The Adjuster’s place within the history of Canadian film, as well as its use of “intimacy and detachment” to advance its thematic interests.

Tellingly, The Adjuster is set in an unnamed Canadian location. The world of the film is populated entirely by non-descript locations: the Render home is actually a model home in an empty tract of suburbia, abandoned when the developer went broke. The survivors of the fires that Noah works and sleeps with are all put up in a generic motel and Hera’s censor job takes place in an innocuous theater within a cavernous non-descript archive.

McSorley reads the lack of identifiers in the film as, in part, a reflection of the Canadian film funding model. At the time funding was available at both the provincial (Ontario Film Development Corporation) and federal (Canadian Film Development Corporation) level. Both agencies were incentivizing filmmakers to make work that was more commercial in order to sell films internationally, which was essentially code-speak for “remove the Canadian references” such as geographical and cultural specificity.

Situating the film in these liminal spaces reinforce its themes and character arcs, particularly the deconstruction of role-play and simulation. When The Adjuster ends with a startling reveal that recontextualizes who Noah is, it works because he and the other characters don’t seem to live in the real world. The result is a haunting meditation on the struggle to connect to others; characters are instead caught in a cyclical baptism of fire, role-play, mediated video, and shimmering memories of violence.

The Adjuster may not be a straightforward horror film, but it feels distinctly genre-adjacent in the way audiences describe A24 and NEON films. Fans who have exhausted the weird sex and chilly aesthetics of Cronenberg would do well to check out Egoyan for their next fix.