Atom Egoyan’s film is a glossy, erotic thriller with an arthouse veneer, but it owes more to the likes of Single White Female than the Canadian director might care to acknowledge.

It is also the film that Liam Neeson was making when his wife Natasha Richardson died in a freak accident this year, although you wouldn’t know it from his typically solid, dependable performance.

Indeed the top-notch cast of Neeson, Julianne Moore and the increasingly impressive Mamma Mia star Amanda Seyfried endow this material with more weight and dignity than it perhaps deserves.

Moore is Catherine, a Toronto gynaecologist convinced her lecturer husband David (Neeson) is having an affair. So after bumping into a local escort girl Chloe (Seyfried) she hires her — as you do — to tempt her husband and report back.

This improbable scenario gets even sillier as Catherine gets turned on first by Chloe’s debriefing sessions, then by Chloe herself. Then, predictably, Chloe turns out to be a bunny boiler of the first order.

The script by Erin Cressida Wilson — who also wrote the enjoyably perverse Secretary — actually has a serious subtext, concerning the worries Catherine has about getting older. Wintry Toronto cityscapes and visions of young beauty, like the young girls to whom she’s losing her stroppy teenage son, remind her of advancing years.

Moore, translucently beautiful as ever, handles this subtly and well.

The real narrative problem is Chloe. Although Seyfried, all pillowy lips and billiard-ball eyes, invests her with a potent sexual power, the character is blank. An early shot of scars on her arms hints at something deeper, but she ends up as just a tool that Egoyan and Wilson use to move the plot on.

At least it looks good. The glossy rooms these characters inhabit are as desirable as the three stars, and the sex scenes are charged but tasteful. A good date movie for the middle-aged, perhaps.

Chloe previews as part of the 53rd London Film Festival tonight at 9pm and 9.15pm at the Vue West End; further screenings tomorrow and Saturday.