Fiction is stranger than truth

Scott Speedman, Arsinée Khanjian and Devon Bostick in Adoration

IT'S BEEN a slow decade for Atom Egoyan. Where the Truth Lies, a comparatively mainstream effort from 2005, had its charms, but nobody was likely to confuse it with earlier, more intellectually knotty pictures such as Exoticaand The Sweet Hereafter.

You couldn't really call Adorationa convincing return to form. Egoyan does, however, play some entertaining games with the audience as he hacks away at half a dozen underdeveloped themes.

The film has the sort of plot that is only tolerable in an art film or an embossed airport paperback. Zipping backwards and forwards through time, Adorationfollows Simon (Devon Bostick), a Canadian teenager, as he develops a school project based around the death of his parents. His version relates how his Muslim father persuaded his mother to carry a bomb on to an airliner.

When the tale gets on to the net, it generates a flurry of largely meaningless webcam chatter throughout the planet. Younger people oscillate between agitation and uninterested numbness. Older academics disappear up their own orifices. The story is, however, entirely made-up. The boy’s parents died in a car crash.

There’s a lot more going on. Simon’s uncle (Scott Speedman), a gruff car clamper, encounters a veiled Arab woman on his lawn and loses his temper. The boy’s grandfather is dying. His teacher (Arsinée Khanjian), who encouraged the fraudulent project, seems to have issues of her own.

For everything that works in Adoration, there is something else that flops pathetically about the screen like a dying animal. The engagement with online Chinese whispers, though paranoid and faintly reactionary, produces some terrifically engaging juxtapositions. Simon's interweaving of truth and fiction delivers a surprisingly rich meta-narrative. But the progressively more implausible story meanders drunkenly from casual naturalism to magic realism without ever settling into a comfortable groove.

If Adorationwere by a less distinguished director, you might be tempted to dropkick it into the wastepaper basket. As things stands, it (just about) qualifies as a worthwhile diversion in a singular career.