Atom Egoyan’s Adoration (2008) is a movie that wants desperately to be profound. It wants to explore terrorism, grief, identity, technology, storytelling, memory, and a teenager playing the violin. Instead, it plays out like a high school debate club project stretched into a full-length film—awkward, confused, full of monologues that sound deep but mean nothing, and just self-serious enough to make you long for a Michael Bay explosion, or at least a coherent sentence.
The plot is a tangled techno-fable centered around Simon (Devon Bostick), a brooding high school student with an emo haircut and the voice of a sleep-deprived NPR intern. He lives with his grumpy uncle Tom (Scott Speedman, acting like he’s just come from a failed audition for a lumber commercial), because his parents died years ago in a car crash under mysterious circumstances. You know, classic Egoyan setup: vague family trauma, dead-eyed characters, and a story that immediately begins folding in on itself like a soggy origami swan.
Simon’s French teacher, Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s perennial muse and supplier of cryptic emotional tension), assigns a creative translation exercise that ends with Simon inventing a story where his dead father was a terrorist who planted a bomb in his pregnant mother’s suitcase. This isn’t flagged as alarming behavior, apparently, because in Egoyan’s universe, all emotional red flags are just misunderstood artistic expressions.
Rather than explaining that this story is fictional, Simon decides to post it online under the pretense that it’s real. What follows is a baffling series of webcam monologues, online flame wars, and philosophical YouTube comment sections where people argue about terrorism, Islamophobia, and family betrayal in the same tone you’d use to complain about a late pizza delivery. This is where Adoration goes full Egoyan: technology as metaphor, emotional repression as art, and teenagers speaking in full essays about epistemology while you, the viewer, slowly forget how human speech works.
The central mystery—what really happened to Simon’s parents—unfurls so slowly it feels like narrative waterboarding. Did his father kill his mother? Was it a car accident? Was it a metaphor for something else entirely? Is the violin the key to understanding any of this? (Spoiler: no, the violin is just there to make the silences feel more European.)
Egoyan tries to juggle multiple timelines and layers of reality—flashbacks, imagined events, present-day therapy sessions disguised as lectures—but it all collapses into a cinematic Jenga tower of sadness and vague intentions. Characters speak in cryptic fragments, as if they’re all auditioning for a Canadian version of The Matrix where no one gets to fight, smile, or express a human emotion above a light wince.
Bostick does his best as Simon, but he’s saddled with a character who spends most of the film typing, staring, or being confused. He’s supposed to be the emotional anchor, but instead he floats somewhere between precocious and profoundly irritating. His grief is overwritten and underplayed. His insights are Wikipedia-deep and delivered with the intensity of a hungover substitute teacher.
Arsinée Khanjian, as Sabine, whispers her way through the film like a ghost with tenure. Her character, who may or may not be an ex of Simon’s father, may or may not be trying to manipulate Simon for her own ends, and may or may not be a functioning adult, becomes less a teacher and more a live-action Tumblr thread about moral ambiguity. It’s never clear whether she’s guiding Simon toward healing or just screwing with him because she’s bored and tenured in Toronto.
And then there’s Scott Speedman as Uncle Tom, who delivers every line like he’s afraid of waking someone up. He’s supposed to be Simon’s guardian and emotional compass, but he mostly stands in doorways looking confused and vaguely constipated. At one point, he confronts Sabine, and you think—finally, conflict! But then they just sort of… talk at each other until the tension dies of natural causes.
The film is littered with Egoyan’s usual tics: mournful string music, carefully composed static shots, characters gazing through windows as if clarity is just past the drapes. There’s a constant feeling that something important is being said—about technology, about performance, about truth—but it’s buried under so much narrative cross-talk and emotional constipation that it never lands. It’s like being trapped in a therapy session conducted entirely via interpretive dance and dial-up internet.
The technology angle is particularly hilarious in retrospect. Watching people in 2008 have philosophical meltdowns over a teen’s fake webcam confession is like watching a Shakespearean tragedy unfold in a YouTube comment section. Egoyan wants to make a grand point about how digital storytelling shapes our understanding of truth. But instead, he makes the internet look like a moody chatroom from The Sims, filled with philosophy majors and people who own too many scarves.
And when the truth finally comes out—about Simon’s parents, about Sabine’s motives, about the purpose of the film—it’s not satisfying. It’s not cathartic. It’s a slow shrug wrapped in a violin solo. The emotional payoff is so underwhelming you might miss it entirely while adjusting your seat cushion or checking your own pulse to make sure you’re still alive.
Look, Atom Egoyan has always been more about themes than plot. He’s not interested in giving you answers. He wants to provoke thought. But Adoration doesn’t provoke thought—it provokes fatigue. It’s all abstraction and no humanity. All suggestion, no connection. Like being offered a gourmet meal that turns out to be printed on a napkin. You admire the effort, but you leave starving.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 terrorist metaphors in a minor key.
Watch it if you enjoy philosophical webcam theater, unresolved trauma, and characters who speak like Siri attending a funeral. Everyone else: adore something else. Your brain, your patience, and your sense of narrative coherence will thank you.
