Review of The Imposter (2012) by Kevin N — 29 Sep 2012

An intense and involving documentary, but one that walks a fine and dangerous line between being well-constructed and manipulative. It all starts in San Antonio, Texas, in the summer of 1994, where a boy named Nicholas disappeared mysteriously one day.

Three years later, Nicholas' family received a call from someone in Spain; their boy had been found, and was ready to return home. But the film's titular twist, which we find out very early on, is that Nicholas hasn't been found.

Instead, a grown man by the name of Frederic Bourdin has decided to impersonate the boy in order to escape and begin a new life with a different identity in the United States. He is a mannish boy, and he does manage to make himself look 16-ish.

Yet something is off; the family excepts this man into their home without question. Even by his own admission, the brown-eyed, French-speaking Bourdin hardly passes as an American teenager, let alone this blonde all-American boy, and yet the family doesn't raise a single red flag- and herein lies the real terror of the story, which I will leave un-described for those who want to take this journey.

It is a truly horrifying chunk of real life, and the people in it are so strange and so morally questionable that one couldn't make characters up to match them. Where the film's only trouble comes is near the end, when filmmaker Bart Layton decides to take a side and lean firmly on it, doing some pretty blatant framing.

Though I actually probably agree with the side he takes, his emphasis on it almost turned me off to the beautiful documentary editing he had done up to it. Still, the story is so nightmarish and involving that this stands as one of this year's most unmissable movies.