Exotica is a 1994 Canadian film written and directed by Atom Egoyan, and starring Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Don McKellar, Arsinée Khanjian, and Elias Koteas.

Set primarily in the fictional Exotica strip club in Toronto, the film concerns a father grieving over the loss of a child and his obsession with a young stripper.

Marketed as an erotic thriller on its release in Canada and the United States, the film proved to be a major box office success for English-language Canadian cinema, and received positive reviews.

Francis Brown, a tax auditor for Revenue Canada, is a regular visitor to a Toronto strip club called Exotica.

In his professional life, Francis is sent to audit an exotic pet store owned and operated by Thomas Pinto, an introverted gay man profiting from the illegal import of a rare bird species.

Thomas has been smuggling hyacinth macaw eggs, and his operation has afforded him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, spurring suspicion from Canadian authorities.

While Christina gives Thomas a lap dance, he attempts to glean information from her, and the two have a conversation which Francis listens to from his parked car.

[13] Bruce Greenwood was cast in the film after he met Egoyan through a mutual friend in a bar, before the director had raised his international profile.

[14] Art directors Richard Paris and Linda Del Rosario built the Exotica strip club set in an unused room in the Party Centre, a Toronto building, with construction commencing in May 1993.

[15] The cinematography was done by Paul Sarossy, with Egoyan saying the goal of the camerawork was to capture the perspective of a missing character, in this case Francis' dead daughter.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Exotica simmers with sex and obsession, while successfully doubling as an extreme character study.

He judged it Egoyan's best film to date and said Mia Kirshner "combines sexual allure with a kindness that makes her all the more appealing".

[36] Leonard Klady, writing for Variety, called it "a haunting, chilling experience", albeit with an ending that was "anticlimactic, fuzzy and considerably less than a knockout emotional punch".

[37] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B+, concluding "Like Christina's dance, the movie is a gorgeous tease, an artful promise of something that never quite arrives".

[39] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote "Exotica is Egoyan's most accomplished and seductive film to date", and less flashy than the upcoming Showgirls (1995) promised to be.

[40] B. Ruby Rich of The Advocate wrote the film is "a jigsaw puzzle of the emotions in which sex spells out whole language of human behavior", and said the cast, including Kirshner and Don McKellar, "rivet our attention on these characters".

[38][39][42] In 2001, Girish Shambu, writing for Senses of Cinema, said "Atom Egoyan's sad, elegant Exotica (1994) is at once intimate and remote, concrete and abstract", praising Bruce Greenwood for "quiet gravity" and Sarah Polley as "precociously perfect".

Club stated "Exotica —much like Egoyan’s subsequent film, The Sweet Hereafter— proves to be a devastatingly cathartic exploration of tragedy's aftermath and the ways that people attempt to cope with inexpressible grief".

[49] At the 1994 Genie Awards, the film won eight prizes, including Best Motion Picture and Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Egoyan.