SOURCE: A review of Felicia's Journey, in Cineaste, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter, 1999, p. 42.

In the following review, Porton offers a positive assessment of Felicia's Journey, noting Egoyan's skill in creating relationships between characters.

Neither a straightforward genre film nor a simple portrait of mental aberration, Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey brilliantly subverts the conventions of the standard Hollywood thriller as well as the cliches of the by-now hackneyed serial killer subgenre. While Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's novel possesses superficial affinities to the work of Hitchcock and Chabrol, the Canadian director's more meditative style prevents us—as audience members—from being pawns of an autocratic auteur. The emphasis in this film is less on individual psychosis than on the web of relationships (both social and implicitly political) that engender it.

Felicia's Journey promotes a distinctively contemplative form of suspense by recounting the commingled destinies of two mismatched protagonists: Felicia (Elaine...