Devil's Knot

Real-life based drama is not the sort of material one associates with Atom Egoyan, a director given more to art-house film-making, but here he delivers a workmanlike account of the controversial 1993 case of the “West Memphis Three” – three Arkansas adolescents who were convicted, apparently wrongly, of the ritual murder of three boys. The subject was dealt with not long ago in Amy Berg’s 2012 documentary, West Of Memphis, whilst Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofky tracked the story in their three-part documentary, Paradise Lost, which followed the case over many years and was instrumental in the eventual release of the three in 2011. 

Why Egoyan felt the story needed to be re-told is far from clear as the director doesn’t add anything new to the known facts (the film is based on an investigative book by Mara Leveritt).  Even odder is the casting of Colin Firth as Ron Lax, a private investigator from Memphis who donated his services to the defense team. Not that he doesn’t do his usual professional job but why one asks why Firth when so many American actors could have done as well and saved us the incongruity.

The dramatic weight of the film is on Firth and Reese Witherspoon who plays Pam Hobbs, the mother of one of the victims and does so with the kind of authenticity that Firth, unsurprisingly, lacks. Ditto for Alessandro Nivola who plays her volatile husband.

Whilst the film certainly demonstrates that justice was not done it doesn’t offer any explanation for the murders – it might have been a vagrant black man, it might have been the boys’ fathers and although suggesting that a fourth adolescent might have been involved if not the actual perp, the film only seems certain that it was not the accused. We are left none the wiser. Still, unsolved crime stories are usually intriguing and the subject matter holds our attention. Perhaps in this respect Egoyan’s self-effacement is a good thing.

 

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