Her later works, however, pursue more profound artistic questions where she investigates the processes of perception and attribution of meaning, at times in the light of larger cultural and existential themes, like colonialism, faith and posthumanism.
Writing in the journal PAJ, Jane Philbrick describes Ahtila's films as "Smart, emotionally arresting, engaging, affective."
Philbrick continues, saying, "A self-described 'teller of human dramas', she approaches narrative equipped with a rigorous arsenal of postmodern strategies ... One of her most potent tools, however, is a two-centuries-old dramatic genre of proven emotional reach and punch, melodrama."
Although done in a more sophisticated way than conventional melodramas, Ahtila's work likewise exaggerates plots and characters to affect the viewer's emotions, with less appeal to immediate intellectual comprehension.
[12] In 2002, Ahtila created a film called The House, for which she performed research that included conducting interviews with people who are afflicted by psychotic mental disorders.
The sounds become disorienting and the images begin to combine: the woman can see the car on the walls of the house; she hears boat horns that make no sense.
[16] She has also had solo shows at the Guggenheim in Bilbao,[17] Moderna Museet in Stockholm,[18] the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin,[19] the Parasol Unit in London, ACMI in Melbourne[20] and DHC/ART in Montreal.
New York's Museum of Modern Art, which housed the seven-day exhibition, called it, "a haunting and layered consideration of how history affects our perception of reality."