Egoyan’s last feature, the Toronto-set Chloe, didn’t receive the warmest response outside of our city, which might explain why Egoyan’s gone fully American with his latest film, which stars Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth. Devil’s Knot follows a murder trial in Tennessee in which three underprivileged teenage boys are wrongfully accused of murdering three young boys. Egoyan’s film is based on the same murder trial that Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky followed in their Paradise Lost series of documentaries, which eventually raised enough public awareness to get the three boys released in 2011.

Documentarian Errol Morris once suggested to artists “set up an arbitrary set of rules, and then follow them slavishly.” This, in itself, is a pretty arbitrary rule for an artist, but it’s something that Atom Egoyan could learn from on his next project. Though his early films were heavily structured, his latest have been all over the place. Devil’s Knot begins as a family drama and then spends time as a whodunit before finally settling as a courtroom procedural. At the heart of the film is Colin Firth, giving one of the weakest performances of his career as a Ron Lax, a private investigator who works pro bono for the defendants because he feels really strongly about defending the innocent. The film suggests that his feelings have some sort of motivation, but those scenes were probably cut so Egoyan could spend more time “scaring” us with hackneyed depictions of southern Evangelicalism and adolescent occultism.

Devil’s Knot will screen for the public on Sunday, September 8 at 9:00pm at the Elgin Theatre and on Monday, September 9 at 9:00am at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

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Alan Jones writes about film for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.

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