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Director: Atom Egoyan

Given the exhaustive coverage of the so-called West Memphis Three — the mysterious murder of the children Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Steven Branch — you might wonder why the  celebrated Canadian director Atom Egoyan has decided to make a contribution to the subject.

The answer is that Egoyan doesn’t provide a documentary post-mortem. Based on Mara Leveritt’s novel, Devil’s Knot is a dramatisation of the paranoia that has permeated US ideological consciousness since the era of the Founding Fathers.

It’s in the tradition of plays like The Crucible and novels like To Kill A Mocking Bird and their exploration of the fear of the unknown that has also inspired many cold war horror stories and conspiracy thrillers.

In Egoyan’s film, an incompetent manhunt with the crime scene compromised by humans and animals sees the police arrest teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley. Echols is charismatic, educated and interested in the occult, while Baldwin is naive and Misskelly educationally challenged.

Suffice to say they’re all played convincingly by the splendid cast, with James Hamrick excelling as Echols.

After due process, presided over by a prejudiced judge (Bruce Greenwood), they are found guilty. There’s scant circumstantial evidence with the prosecution in their xenophobic Arkansas community simply asserting that they belonged to a satanic cult.

Having related the story and the attempt to thwart the truth, the film concentrates on Ron Lax (Colin Firth), an intrepid investigator who’s convinced they’re innocent. In the face of prevarication and intimidation he has to build connections and win confidence.

This includes winning the co-operation of Byer’s mother (Reece Witherspoon), who begins to suspect her secretive husband John (Kevin Brand)

There’s so much suspicion, false trails and, in local parlance, “combobulations” that matters begin to resemble the fabled Devil’s Knot.

The three are  clearly innocent and after a decade-long campaign were released by making so-called Alford Pleas, having had to first plead guilty.

Egoyan has no definite conclusion other than mentioning other suspects. The culprits are the community’s consensus. An estranged society living with such systemic paranoia looks for scapegoats — the un-American “Them.”