Where the Truth Lies is an Atom Egoyan film, which means that where it alludes to being one thing, it’s usually another. Here he strides into noir territory with colour cannons blazing; it is soft-core eroticism that’s not especially soft, nor particularly erotic; it's a whodunnit, of sorts. As said, this is an Atom Egoyan film.

Two timelines relate one story of former TV golden boys, Vince and Lanny (Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon) whose professional and personal relationship shatters the night a body of a young woman turns up in their hotel room. As one character says, “there’s always a girl”. Secrets are locked away until a journalist (Alison Lohman) comes digging for pay-dirt fifteen years later, and that body is the key to her success.

Egoyan’s best works (arguably The Sweet Hereafter) are character expressions, essays on personal relationships. This is no different as it examines the close friendship of two men, their public persona and the counterpoint of their private lives brought together by necessity. The fly that makes the ointment stick is Lohman’s journalist, or at least that’s Egoyan’s intention. For the most part, Where the Truth Lies crackles as it jumps between past and present, truth and lies, dark humour and sudden violence. But neither Firth, Bacon nor Egoyan are a match for Lohman’s thoroughly unconvincing effort that, having sapped life from every highly textured scene, finally breaks the circuit as the film crumbles in a fatally overplayed ending. Entertaining and occasionally affecting, the stilted and hopelessly uneven result is a major disappointment given the possibilities one comes to expect of an Atom Egoyan film.

// COLIN FRASER