Egoyan's exotica: Where does the real horror reside?

Voyeurism, Egoyan implies, is not only a humiliating position of someone who cannot achieve more, cannot have 'the real thing': it also forms a relationship, and allows a unique position of power. What Egoyan is fascinated by is not what people show and watch, but what people hide, or attempt to hide. This dialogue between the images of visibility and what they disguise, between façade and tormented secrecy, between nudity and the privacy of the self conveys also a dialectic Egoyan holds between postmodernist and modernist beliefs. Imposture is a major theme in Egoyan's films: 'identity itself is malleable, to be borrowed, customized or invented'. Egoyan sees the artificiality involved; his protagonists direct their own films. Exotica follow an opposite path to that of the conventional detective film. Exotica can also be seen as a critique of post-capitalist society.