Eclectic director Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Chloe) returns with this rather drab and unconvincing true life-based film, adapted from the non-fiction book by Mara Leveritt, about the murder of three young boys in a small West Memphis, Arkansas community that led to three teenagers being put on trial for murdering them as part of a satanic ritual.
It’s a notorious story previously explored in the documentaries West of Memphis and the Paradise Lost trilogy, and Egoyan’s film merely stands in the shadow of them. It’s a curiously uninvolving film that lackadaisically rehashes both information that could easily be digested in a few minutes from Wikipedia and tropes of the murder investigation/trial films of the past. The likes of Zodiac, Primal Fear and the recent TV series masterpiece True Detective come to mind when watching and it only pales in comparison.
It plays more like a paint-by-numbers straight-to-TV movie rather than the compelling and mysterious big-screen film it so desperately wants to be, only elevated by a talented cast that is utterly wasted. Reese Witherspoon does her best in the role of the grieving mother of one of the murdered boys but she is saddled with a clichéd character that doesn’t really have much to do. Colin Firth seems only there to brood as he stares over at others from afar, as well as showing off his newly practised Southern accent. The likes of Dane DeHaan, Kevin Durand, Stephen Moyer, Amy Ryan and Elias Koteas are all similarly underutilized in flat and unmemorable roles.
It never gets to the heart of any of the moral dilemmas inherent in the story, too interested in melodrama for it to make for anything substantially exploratory or thematically complex, merely grazing certain vital aspects of the story while stuck in the mud of others far too long – wading through documents and back-and-forth courtroom scenes seem to go on forever with little tension or apprehension achieved. It’s also all over the place in terms of pacing and structure, never clear on what part of the story we’re supposed to be caring about; the grieving families? The trial? The potentially wrongly accused teenagers and the sentence they’re facing? The xenophobia of the townsfolk and the blame placed thereof? There’s too much going on and not enough focus to keep it altogether. The result is a scattershot and dramatically inert film that leaves you ill-informed and unsatisfied, lacking the personality of some of the director’s previous and best work.
To be fair the film is not without its effective moments, mainly in the earlier scenes that seek to settle us into normalcy before pulling the rug out from under us when the terrible murders are discovered. It just unfortunately devolves from there into a cliché-ridden and convoluted investigation docudrama that fails to capture the obvious complexities and harrowing details of the true story. There’s a compelling and fittingly disturbing dramatization of these events to be made but sadly Devil’s Knot isn’t it.
Devil’s Knot is released in UK cinemas on June 13th.
