The tragic story of the notorious 1993 West Memphis murders is being dramatized in Devil's Knot, the latest film from director Atom Egoyan (Chloe). Remstar Films has now released the first trailer for this upcoming drama with Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon.
The disturbing and fascinating yet ultimately redemptive true story of three young boys convicted of a murder they didn't commit has already been told near perfectly thanks to both HBO and Peter Jackson's documentaries.
The first trailer gives a look at Egoyan's take on the infamous West Memphis Three, which focuses on a grieving mother (Witherspoon) involved in the case, as well as a detective (Firth) trying to put the pieces together and figure out if the three goth teens accused of murder are guilty.
Egoyan's adaptation of Mara Leveritt's true crime book ‘Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three' also stars Dane DeHaan, Mireille Enos, Bruce Greenwood, Elias Koteas, Stephen Moyer, Alessandro Nivola, and Amy Ryan.
The film debuts on January 24th, 2014 in Canada, with no U.S. date from Image Entertainment yet, but is about to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival next week.
Check out the first trailer and poster for the film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM02SXx7P5A
The official description of the film (TIFF):
Atom Egoyan dramatizes the fallout from the notorious 1993 West Memphis murders, focusing on the grieving mother (Reese Witherspoon) of one of the murdered boys as she grows increasingly troubled by the lynch-mob fever that grips the town.
When three young boys were brutally murdered in the small community of West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993, their deaths led to shock and outrage in this tightly knit religious town. It wasn't long before three teenagers were arrested, tried, and sentenced — two of them to life imprisonment and one to death — despite the fact that they all claimed innocence. This story of wrongful conviction roiled the American justice system, brought a number of prominent movie stars and rock musicians to the defence of the three young men, and resulted in a trilogy of documentaries, Paradise Lost, that did much to keep the case in the public eye.
Atom Egoyan has revisited the story of the West Memphis Three and dramatized it for the screen in a film as compelling and disturbing as the truth itself. Egoyan is a master at telling tales about deeply misunderstood outsiders, their families and communities, and their darkest fantasies. In Devil's Knot Egoyan is completely at home sketching the small-town lives of ordinary people befuddled and angered by the senseless killing in their ostensibly safe town. Reese Witherspoon plays Pam Hobbs, mother of one of the murdered boys, whose grief and shock is palpably felt and subtly depicted. Into her life comes Ron Lax (Colin Firth, also at the Festival in The Railway Man), a private investigator for whom the sum of the case's parts doesn't quite add up, and who is driven to get at the truth.
While much of Devil's Knot focuses on the adults embroiled in the case, Egoyan is also highly sensitive to the young accused, whose lives are shattered by the deaths and who must face the scorn of the town. The three are cast by a series of witnesses as deviant satanic cultists, as all sense of justice and proportion is abandoned in the rush for a convenient scapegoat.
