Adoration is a return to vintage Atom Egoyan, an overturned jumble of curious parts that the Canadian auteur's unseen hand fits together, piece by piece, until finally pulling away to reveal an oddly affecting portrait rendered in shades of loss, guilt, isolation, and, ultimately, redemption. The plot involves an orphaned teenager named Simon (young Canadian actor Devon Bostick, a natural) who lives in a bleak city north of the border with his tow truck driver uncle -- a solemn and embittered man played with captivating skill by Scott Speedman. (Read my interview with Speedman here.)
Simon is obsessed with technology, and spends much of his time peering through the LCD monitor of a handheld videocamera, capturing the testimony of his grandfather in a hospital bed; the old man is enormously pissed off about Simon's deceased father, for some, unexplained reason, and swears up and down he's a murderer.
Meanwhile, in a translation exercise in French class, Simon's teacher Sabine (Egoyan's wife and frequent collaborator Arsinée Khanjian) reads aloud a newspaper report about a terrorist who sends his unwitting, pregnant wife onto a plane with a bomb buried in her luggage. Simon instantly clings to the story, offering to rewrite it from the point of view of the still unborn child. Sabine strongly encourages the exercise, then coaches him in delivering it as a monologue to his classmates.
The process of inhabiting this nearly-exploded fetus's consciousness (the bomb in the story never detonates) becomes a drug to Simon, and he begins relaying the imagined experience in video conferencing chat rooms that look something like Brady Bunch grids on steroids. Before long, the internets are ablaze with all manner of talking heads -- housewives, Holocaust survivors, neo-Nazies, Simon's classmates -- heatedly discussing the implications of Simon's testimony. Meanwhile, we're presented with a series of flashbacks -- some real, some imagined -- revolving a WASPy violinist and the Palestinian violin-maker she meets on her travels in the Middle East. Are these Simon's parents? The figures from the newspaper account? It's not clear.
How and why these figures come to intertwine is the question, and Egoyan, as much a showman as he is a man of big ideas, unlocks the doors along this long emotional corridor with precision. Long past the satisfying final reveal, however, it's Adoration's central themes -- how technology both masks and mirrors the human experience, how cultural perceptions and misinterpretations divide us, and, ultimately, how love and the denial of it can both define and release us -- that end up sticking to your bones. It's unusual and highly effective storytelling. Rating (out of 10): 8.5