The Ending Of Chloe Explained

In 1994, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan exploded onto the international indie scene with "Exotica," a meditation on sex, money, and loneliness that takes place among the workers and patrons of a high-end Toronto strip club. 15 years later the director revisited that same world, but from a different angle, in the erotic thriller "Chloe." Here, the eponymous sex worker (Amanda Seyfried) works out of a fancy hotel lobby instead of a smoky club, and her clientele is not a roomful of wealthy yet pathetic men, but one man at a time — or in this case, one woman. Catherine (Julianne Moore) is a middle-aged doctor who feels invisible to the men in her life, husband David (Liam Neeson) and teenage son Max (Max Thieriot). But her desire to be seen, to be felt, to be loved again comes at a higher price than she could have imagined.

The mysteries of "Chloe" are less about the twists and turns of the plot and more about the way love and intimacy become detached from one another, either from one shocking incident or through the slow march of time. Or as David puts it late in the film, "When did we stop picking each other up from the airport?" That being said, there are several unanswered questions posed by the film's sudden veer into "Fatal Attraction" territory, and an epilogue that finds a young woman dead and a family not only undisturbed by her fate, but seemingly better off for it. Let's take a look at the end of "Chloe."

After their night of passion, Chloe becomes obsessed with Catherine, showing up at her office and flirting with Max. To make matters worse, David now suspects her of having an affair. Racked with guilt, Catherine calls a meeting for the three of them to clear the air, but when Chloe arrives, it's clear to her that David and the young woman have never actually met. The erotic stories Chloe told of their trysts in the park were just that: stories. Chloe quickly runs away, but the meeting gives Catherine and David a chance to reconnect, finally, both physically and emotionally.

David returns to work and Catherine goes home by herself, but she is not alone. While she and David were reconciling, Chloe went to their house and had sex with Max. Catherine finds the two of them asleep in the upstairs bedroom. Shocked and appalled, she confronts Chloe, who attacks her with the sharp silver hairpin that was the subject of their first conversation. In the struggle, one of the home's massive windows pops out. Chloe clings to the window frame and then falls to her death on the broken glass below. Months later, the Stewarts host a graduation party at home for Max and his friends. The family is still together, still a pillar of their community. Catherine smiles at her boys, but when she turns around, we see that she is wearing Chloe's hairpin.

Even before Catherine ends the film wearing the telltale hairpin, the film plays with the ways that Catherine sees not just Chloe, but every female character in the film as a reflection of herself — often an unflattering one. There are her patients, starting their journey into motherhood just as she is finishing hers; or the patient who has never had an orgasm, a dancer whose professional discipline has come at the cost of her most basic pleasure. There is the red-haired waitress at the restaurant who David flirts with, the spitting image of a young Catherine. There are Catherine's boozy middle-aged girlfriends who see the Stewarts as the perfect family, and Max's young girlfriend Anna (Nina Dobrev), whose existence Catherine regards with shock, anger, and perhaps a little jealousy.

At that dinner, while David flirts with the red-haired waitress, Catherine's colleague (R.H. Thomson) teasingly points out the number of tables around them filled with wealthy older men and young women whose attention has obviously been paid for. Catherine is scandalized, but the image of older men with younger women haunts the film afterward. Egoyan fills the background with couples in that same dynamic. It's a visual reference to Catherine's own fears about David — an older man constantly in the company of women decades his junior — as well as a foreshadowing of her own relationship with Chloe. In the end, Catherine is not much different than those men at the restaurant, a wealthy older person using an adoring young woman for sex.

There is a dreamlike quality to both "Chloe" and Chloe herself. First glimpsed by Catherine from afar, Chloe enters the older woman's life exactly when needed, and in her own way, leaves just as conveniently. Given the fact that her sexual encounters with David were imaginary, it's not that much of a leap for audiences to wonder if Chloe herself isn't somehow imaginary as well, the erotic daydream of a wife who is dismayed that middle age hasn't increased her desirability (in her mind, at least) the way it has her husband's. Even the plot's dark turns can be read as Catherine working through her own guilty feelings over accusing her husband of cheating, and her concerns about her son being sexually active in their house.

Granted, there is little on-screen to support the idea that Chloe is a Tyler Durden-esque manifestation of Catherine's sexually repressed subconscious. What we see is by all accounts actually happening in the story. But the idea of an imaginary Chloe goes a long way toward explaining the film's epilogue, as the Stewarts hold a graduation party for Max and his friends. Everyone seems to be having a wonderful time, despite the fact that a sex worker died under grisly and mysterious circumstances in that house just months before. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that Catherine could realistically sweep under the rug, yet life seems to have gone on perfectly well for all of them after Chloe's death.

Bolstered by a steamy premise and the combined star power of Moore, Neeson, and Seyfried (who was just 23 at the time), "Chloe" remains Egoyan's highest-grossing film to date, with a worldwide box office gross of just over $13 million. Critics, however, were for the most part either indifferent or actively hostile toward the film, which contains many of the filmmaker's pet themes, but in presentation and style feels lightyears away from his previous indie hits "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter." Several critics — including former New York mayor Ed Koch of all people, writing for The Atlantic — pointed out how the film's third act swerve into thriller territory unflatteringly recalls "Fatal Attraction." Writer Adam Nayman, in a 2020 retrospective for Criterion, notes that the film was released in the midst of a critical backlash against former indie darling Egoyan. He doesn't defend the film necessarily, but notes that its "fashionably upscale" style was like "a target on the movie's back."

Still, the film had some notable fans. Toronto Star critic Peter Howell was enjoyably scandalized by the way the film turned his and Egoyan's chilly hometown into "a hotbed of illicit lust." Roger Ebert's three-and-a-half star review for the Chicago Sun-Times praised the film while taking issue with those who might be unsatisfied with the ending. "Is it arbitrary?" he writes. "Most of life's conclusions are arbitrary ... It's not the kind of movie that depends on the certainty of an ending. It's more about how things continue."

Though the theatrical release keeps the final images of Catherine and her family somewhat ambiguous, it wasn't always that way. There were in fact two different alternate endings to the film that shed light — perhaps too much light — on what the story "means," if anything. Visually, the endings are the same as what we see in the final cut: A montage of David comforting Catherine as paramedics take Chloe's body away, and finally the graduation party months later. But in one alternate ending, those images are accompanied by a monologue by Chloe from beyond the grave. She admits that she let go of the window frame intentionally, as a way to connect herself to Catherine forever, to transcend the temporary nature of the sex worker-client relationship, and to embed herself into another person's life.

The other alternate ending features a monologue by Catherine instead. "She could have saved herself," she says of Chloe, "but instead she saved me." Catherine's words sound grateful, and frame the hairpin at the end as a tribute. But at the same time, it's terribly myopic — if not sociopathic — to see someone else's death only in terms of how it benefited you. Catherine's monologue goes a long way to proving Egoyan's thesis that she is the villain of the film, but ultimately both monologues put too neat of a bow on the ending, prescribing meaning when it is better for the audience to decide for themselves.