Devil's Knot

So lurid and bizarre were the details of the West Memphis Three trial that a dramatisation of events to accompany the several documentaries on the subject was inevitable. The need for this narrative film after such extensive coverage, however, is debatable, and Atom Egoyan’s messy effort will do little to convince those who felt it redundant from the get-go.

Based on the book of the same name by investigative journalist Mara Leveritt, Devil’s Knot covers the murder of three eight-year-old boys in Arkansas in 1993 and the hysteria that built up around the crimes in a religious community whipped into a frenzy by a potential (imagined) Satanic edge. The West Memphis Three, non-conformist teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, were targeted by police on hearsay and circumstantial nonsense despite practically no evidence of their involvement.

Egoyan and his screenwriters are keen to point out the absurdity of the case at every turn, but do this so broadly it comes off as farce, with the starry cast overcompensating for the appallingly on-the-nose script with ripe acting – Reece Witherspoon goes for handwringing, Colin Firth attempts bored indifference, while Kevin Durand tries slack-jawed caricature.

Trying to fit in as much evidence of the accused’s innocence as possible while showing where fingers should maybe be pointed is far from deftly handled: aside from witless dialogue, plot lines, characters and expository scenes pop-up with little or no coherence. Hamstrung by the lack of a satisfactory resolution in real life, the picture inherently lacks drama – something David Fincher got around in his masterful Zodiac by using the crime at the heart of that film as a backdrop to the human involvement of those tied up in the case and the general socio-political tensions of the time. This is more third rate John Grisham, hardly appropriate given the horrifying nature of these relatively recent, still unsolved murders.