Review of The Imposter (2012) by Timothy O — 13 Feb 2013

Reality takes one to the head in "The Imposter"-and, in the process, leaves your mind reeling like a Tilt-a-Whirl. It's an elegantly constructed and instantly engrossing puzzle of lies and deception. This impressive documentary-first feature film directed by Bart Layton chronicles an unimaginable case of a child abduction, that ultimately raises more questions than it answers. It is an exquisitely layered documentary that never gives you more than you need to know-and it reveals the it's hand with prefect timing."The Imposter"-a hypnotically strange tale that begins with the agony of a boy gone missing.

A factual thriller that chronicles the story of a 13-year-old boy who disappears without a trace from San Antonio, Texas in 1994. Three and a half years later he is found alive, thousands of miles away in a village in southern Spain with a story of kidnapping and torture. His family is obviously overjoyed to bring him home, swept up into a whirlwind of disbelief and into a state of shock.The boy bears many of the same distinguishing marks he always had, but now he has a strange accent. He doesn't look quite the same but then again he has been tortured and abused for years. Members of the family don't seem to notice these glaring inconsistencies, but why?

Director Bart Layton blends real interviews with re-enactments of Bourdin's deception-- blending the factual and the imagined. Bourdin's own voice often gets dubbed into the mouth of the actor playing him in flashback--an effective theatrical mingling of the actual and the illustrated. But there's a question of credibility in any nonfiction work that exploits dramatic re-enactment. It calls into question the authenticity, is this a dramatized scene-or actual footage.

Director Layton makes remarkable use of one-on-one interviews with Bourdin, Nicholas' family, a San Antonio private investigator, and the FBI agent who cracked Bourdin's ruse. The crime is beyond bizarre--and the film is relentlessly suspenseful, but perhaps the most disturbing question of all is this: Whatever happened to Nicholas Barclay? To that, there remains no satisfactory answer.