What if, for a class assignment, a high school student puts himself into the news story about a man who plants a bomb in his pregnant girlfriend’s luggage. Also, imagine that the high school students inserts his dead parents with those in the real story, his attempt to deal with his parents death leads to falsehoods and misplaced ideas and beliefs. If this idea interest you then you have the idea of what Adoration is all about.

To be honest I had no real idea about this film, It was playing at the same cinema that I had lined up for my PIFF and the plot sounded somewhat interesting. I soon realized that I might have a good film on my hands when the Canadians that I met there could not believe that I had a ticket for this film. I had never heard of the director Atom Egoyan before, so this review of the film is my first film of this director.

The film opens up so nicely with a boy talking to his dying grandfather. You see him recording the conversation and you can see love their. You are then shown the same boy at school, slowly going mad about an article that he has to translate in French Class. He starts over and is late in translating the story.

He tells his teacher that the lady in the story was his mother and that his father was the one that sent his mother on that airplane and that he was in his mothers womb. She tells him that he should tell the class. The students then tells the class his entire story and how angry he is with his father for trying to kill him and his mother. He then states this is why he is living with his uncle.

All of this was within the first few minutes of the film and the crowd around me was gasping and could not believe what they were seeing at the PIFF. At this time, I was not sure what I was watching but it sure had my attention.

For the next few scenes you see that the above story was a lie and you are not sure why the story is being told. Please watch for the scene with a Muslim neighbor and the uncle, you can see the hatred in his eyes and maybe, just maybe, this above lie was now the truth.

What I liked was the chat rooms and the realness of these rooms. You saw pro and con for the story and then the story starts to spread outside the little community and into the real world.

We are then shown the teacher getting fired for telling the student to run with the lie and when her car is illegally parked, it is the uncle that shows up to tow her car. You then see a 5 minute tow with the teacher asking that the car be towed father away and the pay rate goes up so the uncle is all for it.

She then talks the uncle into lunch and then she tells him that she is the teacher that convinced his nephew to spread the lie. She later invites the uncle into her apartment and the twist of the film becomes very clear on why she asked the student to tell the lie and why it will effect the rest of the film.

Another thing that I liked about the film was that one never knows what is coming next. The fans of Atom were really enjoying the film and they told me later that they never saw coming what happened in the film.

When the film was over the audience clapped for a few moments and the crowd that I was able to ask questions to about what we had just saw, loved the film and they gave it very high praise.

Please see the film Adoration when you get the chance.

Grade; A