In the double feature pairing of The Adjuster (1991) and Wish You Were Here (1987), we are confronted with two films that reflect the disintegration of personal identity within the labyrinth of modernity. Both works, through their respective directors, Atom Egoyan and David Leland, illustrate a quiet desperation, though in distinct ways: Egoyan’s The Adjuster delves into the cold, almost clinical manipulation of lives by bureaucracy, while Leland’s Wish You Were Here focuses on the porous boundaries between fantasy and reality, desire and loss. Egoyan's mise en scène is precise, almost architectural in its arrangement of characters and space, underlining the dehumanizing forces at work in the everyday lives of the film’s protagonists. Leland’s film, though equally sharp in its examination of emotional voids, wears its surrealism more freely, its characters drifting in and out of clarity like a feverish dream. Together, these films explore the fragility of human connection, the dissonance between the self and the world, and the pervasive sense of alienation, suggesting that no escape can be fully realized from the entanglements of both internal and external realities. Their shared thematic undercurrent of isolation and the vulnerability of human relationships elevates them beyond mere reflections of personal crisis, serving instead as poignant critiques of the epoch they inhabit.