Felicia’s Journey would have been an ordinary thriller about an innocent girl and a serial killer, if it hadn’t been made by Atom Egoyan, a director whose films are strongly coloured by his own personal preoccupations. Just like The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey is about fate, chance and the course of life, but it focuses on only two protagonists. One is Felicia, an Irish schoolgirl searching England for the man who made her pregnant; the other is Hilditch, a bachelor caterer with a large company. When they meet up, he offers to help her. However a couple of psychopathic traits betray his less noble intentions. Two completely separate and closed worlds meet in these two people. Hilditch is obsessed by a cookery show presented in the fifties by his mother on TV, which he watches endlessly in his huge kitchen. Felicia is from a working-class family and cherishes some ideals that are as naïve as they are romantic. Both suffer from several forms of denial and repression. The film jumps freely from one layer of time to another. The juxtaposition of present and past and the refined dosage of information gives the film its excitement. Familiar Egoyan themes such as the influence of technology on our personal life and psychological and ethical aspects of our contact with others are also masterfully integrated into this genre piece.
