Director: Atom Egoyan.
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Colin Firth, Amy Ryan, Dane De Haan, Alessandro Nivola, Stephen Moyer, Rex Linn, Martin Henderson, Kevin Durand.
Certificate: 15.
Running Time: 114 minutes.
Synopsis: Atom Egoyan’s haunting true mystery about who killed three children in a small town. The police identify three teens, aka the West Memphis Three, as committing the murders during a satanic ritual but the truth may be scarier as a mother (Reese Witherspoon) and investigator (Colin Firth) suspect all is not as it appears.
DEVIL’S KNOT is based on a true story from the early 1990s where a trio of children went missing from their neighbourhood in West Memphis, Arkansas. The three were found horrifically mutilated and bound in a local river the following day, and just a few weeks later, three teenagers were arrested and charged with their murders. Atom Egoyan’s film is a dramatisation of those events of May, 1993, and is based on the 2002 novel by Mara Leveritt (adapted by Paul Harris Boardman and future DOCTOR STRANGE helmer Scott Derrickson), though it is not the first to tell the story of the infamous ‘West Memphis Three.’
In 2012, producer Peter Jackson and acclaimed director Amy Berg presented the superb documentary-feature WEST OF MEMPHIS, a film that focussed on the burning aftermath of the conviction of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr, the three teenagers sentenced to life for the brutal murders of Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore. Before that, a HBO documentary named PARADISE LOST: THE CHILD MURDERS AT ROBIN HOOD HILLS, also focussed in on the controversial crimes; controversial not just because of the brutality, but the apparent injustices served to the three men who went down for it.
If you do not know the story then I apologise for the spoilers, but the sheer atrocity of it leaves very few people not knowing of the terrible events of the spring of 1993, and even the filmmakers give the assumption that the viewer is aware of the subject matter as we’re led into it. These hideous crimes were deemed by the local community to be the work of devil worshippers, and were attached to Satanic cults which were allegedly very active in the deeply religious region at that time. Everyone from the policemen investigating the case, through to the prosectors, and even the judge believed that this was the work of said cults, and after just four hours of interrogation, the murders were pinned upon Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley, despite the lack of evidence against them.
Egoyan’s 2014 take on this tragic tale sees British actor Colin Firth tackle the role of Ron Lax, a private investigator who took on the case after seeing these apparent inconsistences with the evidence and statements made against the charged teenagers, all of whom were facing the death penalty for their alleged crimes. Firth, challenged with his first character with a southern-American accent, is solid as Lax, though spends most of the film gazing into the courtroom’s horizon with seemingly not a lot to do, and often seems terribly mis-cast. Instead, support that includes a virtually unrecognisable Alessandro Nivola, and the top-billed, apparently six-months-pregnant Reece Witherspoon, get all of the gritty material as murdered child Stevie Branch’s step-father and grief-ridden mother respectively, and both are superb in their roles. Stephen Moyer (True Blood) also shows up as the mulleted, deputy prosecuting attorney, as does current Hollywood hot-property Dane De Haan in the limited role of Chris Morgan, another suspect who was detained for questioning in the investigation. Bruce Greenwood is also reliably decent as the questionable judge David Burnett, but overall this film unfortunately lacks an ingredient that fully engages the viewer, despite the strong performances and the many layers of intrigue that surrounds the story to this very day.
DEVIL’S KNOT focusses in on the early part of this shocking tale which leads up to the conviction of these three young adults, and just as the film sparks a little intrigue with the viewer, it abruptly ends leaving them somewhat unsatisfied with any kind of resolution. A million questions remain unanswered, which, when you look at it, mirrors this deeply tragic tale entirely.
[usr=3] DEVIL’S KNOT is released in UK cinemas on Friday 13th June, 2014.
