Devil’s Knot ★★★ ★★
In 1993, the mutilated bodies of Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers — all eight years old — were found floating in a creek in Crittenden County, Arkansas, US.
In 1994, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley — all teenagers — were convicted of the murders. The West Memphis Three, as they became known, were social outcasts who had supposedly murdered the boys in some sort of satanic ritual. The teenagers went to jail insisting they were innocent.
In 2007, new forensic evidence suggested that there may have been another presence at the murder scene. After much publicity, the West Memphis Three entered an Alford plea — a complicated legal deal which allows defendants to protest their innocence while agreeing that enough evidence exists to convict them.
In 2011, they were released with 10-year suspended sentences, after spending more than 18 years in prison.
This is the stuff of which documentaries are made, and there have been four so far. Devil’s
Knot director Atom Egoyan has followed the published chronology of events quite closely, but his version of the West Memphis tragedy is not a documentary. It is a ballad to lost children, told with great sympathy for the shattered psyche of a community looking for scapegoats.
Reese Witherspoon plays Pamela Hobbs, mother of victim Steve Branch. Alessandro Nivola plays Terry Hobbs, Pamela’s husband and Steve’s stepfather, a lowlife upon whom suspicion falls when a private investigator (Colin Firth) does some digging for the defence.
Witherspoon has come a long way since
Legally Blonde (so far, in fact, that other actors no longer make jokes about her name). She was magnificent as June Carter Cash in Walk
The Line (she can also sing, unlike the real June, who would warble off-key harmonies above Johnny’s corduroy baritone).
As Pamela, Witherspoon is less cultured and much less elegant than she was as June (where did they find those shapeless clothes?), but she has the same happy-clappy dimpled charm. Sadly, both her performance and the film’s trajectory seem to run out of fuel halfway through.
Egoyan treats the elements of mystery, dread and horror with the same gentle gravitas that made his The Sweet Hereafter so good, but he could have made a great deal more of oppressive small-town morality and the darkness that hides behind its bicycle sheds. — Sue de Groot