The most shocking thing about Atom Egoyan’s 2013 crime-procedural Devil’s Knot is its reception. The film was widely panned upon release and, if we give credence to this platform as a present barometer of opinion, Letterboxd has it as one of his lowest scored, right next to Egoyan’s unintentionally campy Chloe and his messy if emotionally effective Ryan Reynolds vehicle The Captive. Those two films have gained reputations—one for its aforementioned camp, and the other in particular for its Epstein-like conspiracy that resonates more now than it did in 2014. Meanwhile, Devil’s Knot languishes, reviled or completely forgotten.
It doesn’t help that the film’s subject, the West Memphis Three, is a highly-publicized true crime case, and the subject of the acclaimed documentary series Paradise Lost, which tracks a trio of teens wrongly accused of murdering three younger boys as a part of a Satanic ritual. A common refrain in negative reviews is this comparison, which makes intuitive sense given that they’re both dealing with the same real-life material, and it’s likely Egoyan’s formal inclinations against resolution that makes this film so repulsive to many, especially those interested in “true crime” as a genre.
People who aren’t that familiar with Egoyan’s oeuvre can easily miss just how radical a film this is for the director. So often, Egoyan’s puzzle boxes are built around an atemporality, wherein his directorial omniscience conceals the emotional truth of the traumas underlying his narratives until they can land the biggest pathos. Most of his ostensibly more conventional films (or, at least, the ones that theoretically would have the most mainstream appeal), like The Sweet Hereafter or Exotica (and, again, The Captive, or even his baffling failure Where the Truth Lies) all rely on carefully implemented flashback, forcing the past and present to confront each other.
In Devil’s Knot, as in his earlier masterpiece The Adjuster, Egoyan plays the movie with a constant forward drive through time, with extremely sparse, unreliable, and directly psychological temporal breaks. Any piece of revelation or insight in Devil’s Knot is either a bout of unreliable narration or nightmare. There’s a number of times where a character wakes up in a cold sweat, like Colin Firth’s private investigator Ron Lax, when he awakens from a half-personal dream of shoe laces getting tied around ankles and bike spokes, some twisted vision that perhaps the dead boys might not have been tied up by their killers but wrapped and drowned in the muddy river by mechanical mistake. It’s not anything conclusive, just another theory, like every solution given in the film.
While most of Egoyan’s films head towards a singular solution, all that Devil’s Knot can find is what isn’t true. Even the mother of one of the dead boys, Pam Hobbs (Reese Witherspoon), goes from a vengeful confidence against the West Memphis Three to constant doubt about their guilt as it becomes obvious that the police found an easy story and built their case around it rather than doing the hard work of finding the truth—if that’s even possible.
Structurally, Devil’s Knot is anathema to true crime as a genre, refusing to ramp up its momentum through reveals or any kind of satisfactory, if horrifying, conclusions. Instead, the film’s tension comes out of frustration, of the failure of people to figure out why this crime happened, how this crime happened, and even the failure of people to convince others that this whole process of placating grief and providing “justice” has been a failure; one of the last big blow-ups in the movie is between Lax and the public defenders he’s been investigating for, when their negligence leads to them being unable to mount the defense needed to keep the boys they know to be innocent off the death sentence.
Unlike how David Fincher tries to exude confidence (both narratively and through his precise direction) in the conclusion of Zodiac that he knows who the killer is—a bizarre decision while trying to make an American version of Memories of Murder, which revels in the impossibility of knowing—Egoyan refuses to speculate, instead reaching a kind of narrative entropy, where the search simply loses momentum, remaining unresolved even to this day. The unsatisfactory nature of it all is one of the most terrifying things Egoyan has ever put to screen.