REVIEWED - THE KING: Following a succession of recent movies in which fathers sought out lost sons, The King offers a variation on that theme. Gael Garcia Bernal plays a 21-year-old recently discharged US Navy recruit named Elvis, who returns to his birthplace, the Texan city of Corpus Christi, to confront the father he never met (William Hurt), the pastor at a thriving Baptist church.

Hurt's David Sandow shares a contended suburban family life with his wife (Laura Harring) and their teenaged children (Pell James and Paul Dano). When Elvis approaches him, Sandow rejects this son who for years had been a well-kept secret, and whose return triggers an uncomfortable reminder of the pastor's own wayward past.

Elvis inveigles his way into his father's home and cunningly preys on the family, and The King recalls two edgy, similarly themed late 1960s productions centred on attractive young interlopers: Terence Stamp in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem and Michael York in Hal Prince's Black Flowers for the Bride. In all three films, the family infiltrator is depicted as ostensibly cleancut and irresistibly seductive, and Bernal is perfectly cast in The King as an apparently idealistic innocent who gradually reveals his own twisted, amoral nature.

Hurt's performance matches Bernal's portrayal in conviction and complexity, and, breaking the movie mould, here for once is an evangelist played with an admirable absence of caricature.

The other principal characters feel underwritten, all the more so as the viewer knows much more than they do about Elvis and Sandow. The screenplay, a collaboration between director James Marsh and Monster's Ball writer Milo Addica, treats them and their fates with cold dispassion.

The King is the first narrative feature from Marsh, an English film-maker who worked for the BBC arts series Arena and made the stylised documentary Wisconsin Death Trip. There is no place for dramatic compromise or cosy resolution in his film's bleak, disturbing outlook.