Devil's Knot

The true story of the West Memphis Three has already been pretty well covered by cinema, with superb documentaries like Paradise Lost and West Of Memphis covering the subject as well as humanly possible. For someone to take on a dramatized take of events, they’d want to be bringing something pretty special to the table. Unfortunately, all that director Atom Egoyan brings is an overqualified cast who are left bobbing around looking for something to do.

Pam (Reese Witherspoon) and Terry (Alessandro Nivola) Hobbs are the parents of one of three boys who go missing, but are soon found murdered at the bottom of a nearby river. It’s not long before the finger is being pointed at local goths, believed to be devil worshippers, with the state rounding them up and looking for the death penalty. Anti-capital punishment investigator Ron Lax (Colin Firth) decides to join their defence team, and before too long begins to pull apart the prosecutor’s poorly built case against them, but with the local townsfolk already assigning blame, their possible innocence might not be enough for them to be found not guilty.

Between Egoyan’s unsure direction and a screenplay co-written by Scott Derrickson, who is best known for horror films like Sinister and The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, it’s clear from the offset that Devil’s Knot has no idea what kind of film it wants to be. At some points it feels as if that it’s trying to ape David Fincher’s Zodiac, with precision camera-moves and focused moments on the deluge of evidence. Then it’s trying to be Oliver Stone’s JFK, alluding to a great conspiratorial cover-up and a complete miscarriage of justice. Finally, and most tastelessly of all, it tries to be a glossy John Grisham courthouse thriller, and considering the subject matter, that just doesn’t work. Then there’s the ending, which is akin to Titanic ended right as the iceberg hit, and details of sinking being told via voiceover.

Witherspoon and Firth do their best, and with an avalanche of well-known actors – Bruce Greenwood, Dane DeHaan, Kevin Durand, Elias Koteas, Amy Ryan and more – who are given shockingly little to do, the viability of this project is clear, with potential Oscar bait written all over it. Instead, we’re left with a hollow, pointless retelling of a painful story.