"Chloe" Movie Trailer Review

By our guest blogger, Lauren Bull

One of film’s true delights is when a character yells something slightly ridiculous with real earnestness. When Julianne Moore insists that “this business transaction is over!” in “Chloe,” we’re reminded of the real purpose trailers serve==to make something, anything, stick in your head.

After strongly suspecting her husband David (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her, Catherine (Moore) takes the perfectly obvious step of hiring a very beautiful young escort named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to try and confirm this. If he takes the bait, he’s a cheat, and if he doesn’t, everything’s…fine? The two women meet up in a very swanky place and enjoy a glass of Chardonnay while going over the logistics of this entrapment. It’s unclear from the trailer where Catherine finds Chloe, but given the ominous tone, it must have been Craigslist. Things inevitably start going wrong, which you can tell not only by the quickening of the music, but by the blood dripping down Catherine’s neck by trailer’s end. It’s “Fatal Attraction” meets “The Crush.”

It’s hard to tell who’s the most unstable in all of this, but it seems like Catherine becomes the frightened Michael Douglas character to Chloe’s genuinely loopy Glenn Close stalker, while David just hangs out chatting with his students and acting shady. Elements of the trailer highlight the difference between filming and surveillance. David doesn’t say much here, but so many shots of him look incredibly voyeuristic. For someone suspected of having a roving eye, he’s being pretty closed watched himself.

Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”) is the director, and while the trailer pretty much goes where you expect it (save the Seyfried/Moore sex scene), the actors he directed inspire confidence. It’s worth mentioning how well Moore plays women who feel the men in their lives slowly slipping away. Most recently in “A Single Man,” she was the former party girl terrified of losing the man who will never be attracted to her in the way she needs him to be. And while that character may not exactly match Catherine’s working mother persona, there is a similar vulnerability tinged with hysteria. Moore is the beautiful and successful wife with serious paranoia about fidelity, and Neeson is the perfectly wonderful and handsome husband who might also be a real jerk. In other words, they seem like they could be a pretty believable couple, which is crucial for this to have real impact. Chloe’s madness is more frightening if we see just a little bit of it in them, too.

View the Red Band movie trailer for "Chloe" below.  What are your thoughts?