Devil's Knot Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Devil's Knot Blu-ray Movie Review

The Devil Didn't Do It

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 9, 2014

The "West Memphis Three" are three teenagers—Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley—who were tried, convicted and sentenced for the gruesome 1993 murders of three local boys. Eventually freed in 2011 after a long and arduous court battle, the WM3 have since become a textbook case of bad police work and slipshod prosecution, but the State of Arkansas continues to insist on their guilt even after the state Supreme Court reversed their convictions and ordered new trials. Their release involved a carefully negotiated and rarely used legal technicality in which neither the prosecution nor the defense conceded their position.

Local reporter Mara Leveritt covered the trials and the subsequent investigations by the WM3's supporters. Her book, Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, appeared in 2002, but Leveritt's was not the only work to raise questions about the teens' guilt. A trio of HBO documentaries, The Paradise Lost Trilogy, appeared in 1996, 2000 and 2011, each one revealing new information about the case. In 2012, the documentary West of Memphis, co-produced and partially financed by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, reviewed the entire case in depth and produced damning evidence against another suspect that the West Memphis police had dismissed as the likely killer.

Anyone familiar with the work of Canadian director Atom Egoyan will immediately grasp his attraction to this story. Egoyan has long been fascinated by the ways in which people search for meaning in loss and tragedy. That subject is the central theme of what is probably his finest film to date, The Sweet Hereafter, and it also animates other films such as Exotica and Adoration. In Mara Leveritt's account of the WM3, Egoyan no doubt saw an opportunity to examine an entire community's desperate effort to "process" its grief and anger over the butchering of three children. In a sickening irony, the WM3, who were accused of practicing human sacrifice, were themselves offered up as human sacrifices through which the community could expel the horror that had erupted in their midst. From Egoyan's comments in the Blu-ray's brief extras, it is clear that he wanted the filmed version of Devil's Knot to focus on that aspect of the story, rather than on solving the crime itself.

Unfortunately, the results fall short of Egoyan's aspirations. Bogged down in the intricacies of the actual case, Devil's Knot feels like a two-hour prologue to a story that is just getting started when the film ends. One can see the elements that Egoyan hoped to combine into a meditation on shifting perspectives and the construction of a false narrative, but these elements never jell as effective drama.

The screen adaptation of Devil's Knot, co-written by Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) and revised in consultation with Egoyan, attempts to focus on two protagonists in the West Memphis case, each of whom starts from a different perspective but gradually arrives at the same place. The first is Pam Hobbs (Reese Witherspoon), mother of one of the victims, Stevie Branch (Jet Jurgensmeyer), who can't believe that she let her eight-year-old son go out to show his new bike to his friend, Michael Moore (Paul Boardman Jr.), only to have both of them disappear forever, along with a third boy, Christopher Byers (Brandon Spink). Guilty and grief-stricken, Pam is all too ready to accept Damien Echols (James Hamrick) as the ringleader of a Satanic cult, who led his followers, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley (Seth Meriwether and Kristopher Higgins), in the ritualized torture and murder of her son and his two friends. To Pam, only such aberrant, deviant monsters can explain her loss.

The other protagonist is a private investigator, Ron Lax (Colin Firth), who initially has no involvement in the case. He isn't even from West Memphis. As he listens to the news reports, Lax doesn't really know whether the three teens who have been arrested are guilty. But when he hears that the state will seek the death penalty, he volunteers his services to the court-appointed defense attorneys, because (as he says) "three dead kids is enough".

This study in contrasting perspectives is a potentially interesting approach, but Egoyan is never able to deliver on it. Having assumed the burden of presenting the actual WM3 case, he is stuck with its many factual complexities, which defy easy abridgement. More importantly, Pam Hobbs and Ron Lax are bystanders (or wholly absent) for many of the critical events. The West Memphis police, led by Investigator Gary Gitchell (Rex Linn), are the ones who choose to focus on Damien Echols, prompted in part by an attention-seeker named Vicki Hutcheson (The Killing's Mireille Enos), who pushes her son forward with obviously coached evidence, and also influenced by various "experts" of dubious credentials on Satanic cults. As both Lax and various journalists will later discover, the police simply ignored leads that pointed away from Echols and his friends. Instead, they massaged what little evidence they had until it fit their preexisting theory.

Devil's Knot dutifully covers this territory, but so did the HBO Paradise trilogy and West of Memphis, and Egoyan fails to invest these events with the kind of personal or dramatic weight that would make them something more than an indictment of the local justice system (which is well-deserved). Scenes of Pam Hobbs mourning, being baptized, attending the trials or arguing with her husband, Terry (a nicely understated Alessandro Nivola), who was Stevie's stepfather, do little to connect her with the mechanics of the criminal process and certainly don't prepare us for her sudden impulse, after the trials, to look for a key piece of exculpatory evidence that she turns over to Lax at the end of the film. Whatever has caused Pam to evolve, Egoyan and his screenwriters have been too busy explaining the WM3 case to get inside her head.

Ron Lax has more screen time, as he travels around the county interviewing some of the key players and observing others, including John Mark Byers (Kevin Durand), the father of one of the victims, whose inconsistent stories drew suspicion even during the trial. But as an investigator and an outsider, Lax is already a skeptic at the outset. His attempt to understand the murders only makes sense in contrast to the community's need for certainty and a quick solution. There is an intriguing moment when Lax falls asleep while studying the case file and experiences a nightmare suggesting that he, too, has become prey to the irrational fear driving the case against the WM3, but that theme is never developed. In its place, we get largely irrelevant biographical detail, such as Lax's relationship with his ex-wife (Amy Ryan, who is wasted) and his solitary dining habits.

At the film's conclusion, Pam Hobbs and Ron Lax encounter each other near the crime scene, each having come there looking for answers they have so far failed to find. The incident is fictional and is clearly intended to represent a spiritual as well as a physical encounter, but the moment lacks emotional resonance. It's also immediately undercut by a long series of text screens informing the viewer what happened to the WM3 in the years following their conviction. Here, too, as so often throughout the movie, the facts of the case overwhelm whatever dramatic impact Devil's Knot was trying to achieve.

Devil's Knot Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Egoyan's long-time collaborator, Paul Sarossy, shot Devil's Knot, but according to IMDb, the film was photographed digitally with the Arri Alexa. This is a major departure for Egoyan, who has often expressed his preference for film, but I suspect budgetary considerations dictated the choice. Image Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which was presumably sourced from digital files, reflects all the usual virtues of digital capture: a clean, noiseless and detailed image, deep blacks and precisely calibrated colors, courtesy of post-production on a digital intermediate.

A curious issue is the film's aspect ratio. When my colleague Brian Orndorf reviewed Devil's Knot theatrically, he listed it as 2.39:1, and the stills provided by the studio and included with his review are consistent with that AR. However, the image on the Blu- ray has been framed at 1.78:1. IMDb lists the film's AR as both 2.35:1 and 1.85:1, which suggests that the film was composed for two ARs. (While some people maintain that this is impossible, it is frequently done for television, and David Cronenberg has repeatedly said that he composes for multiple ARs.) Certainly nothing in the Blu-ray image appeared cropped or chopped off. Given the film's limited theatrical distribution and Image Entertainment's typical orientation toward home video, it is more than likely that both ratios were intended.

With its usual penny-pinching approach, Image has placed the film on a BD-25, allowing an average bitrate of 19.99 Mbps, but digital footage compresses easily, and Devil's Knot has numerous scenes of quiet conversation. Artifacts were not an issue.

Devil's Knot Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The 5.1 soundtrack for Devil's Knot, presented here in lossless DTS-HD MA, is a relatively low-key affair with the surrounds limited to environmental noise in courtrooms, press conferences and outdoor settings. The film is dialogue-driven, and the conversations are always clear. The appropriately mournful and foreboding score by Oscar winner Mychael Danna (Life of Pi), who has scored most of Egoyan's films, sets the appropriate tone for the dark subject matter.

Devil's Knot Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Devil's Knot (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:57): This brief featurette includes interviews with Egoyan, author Mara Leveritt, Witherspoon, Firth, Nivola and actor Stephen Moyer (True Blood ), who plays lead prosecutor John Fogleman.



• Getting into Character: The Cast of Devil's Knot (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:48): Various actors discuss their approaches. Witherspoon, Firth and Moyer met their real-life counterparts. Nivola did not, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone familiar with the WM3 case, but his chief concern was that he would not be playing the villain of the story, which he doesn't.



• Deleted Scenes (480i; 2.35:1, enhanced; 5:43): There are only two scenes. One shows Det. McDonough (Brian Howe) questioning Bobby DeAngelo. The other is a long interview by the HBO documentary crew with John Mark Byers and his wife. Of particular note is that the deleted scenes are in the wider aspect ratio of the film's theatrical exhibition.



• Trailers: The film's trailer is not included. At startup, the disc plays trailers for Blood, The Double and The Numbers Station, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Devil's Knot Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The end credits of Devil's Knot feature the usual disclaimer about composite characters and fictionalized events and dialogue, but Egoyan might have been better off jettisoning the historical episode altogether and using it as the basis for an entirely fictional story (as he did in Adoration). There is an intriguing idea buried under the forensic detail of Devil's Knot, which is the difficulty of moving on when the justice system so badly botches a criminal investigation that no one achieves closure. This is the emotional theme that Egoyan clearly wanted to explore, and it is something that the existing documentaries on the WM3 do not cover. Unfortunately, neither does Devil's Knot. Technically proficient as a Blu-ray, but not recommended as a film.