Before Atom Egoyan became Canada’s official exporter of art-house melancholy and incestuous subtext, he made Next of Kin—a film so painfully awkward, so aggressively polite in its mediocrity, it feels like it should come with an apology and a Tim Hortons gift card. This was his debut feature, the cinematic equivalent of a teenager’s slam poetry about suburban alienation, shot through a VHS camcorder held together with duct tape and ennui.
Next of Kin opens with Peter (Patrick Tierney), a wet sponge of a human being who lives with his aggressively WASPy parents in Toronto. They’re cold, distant, and so emotionally repressed they make British monarchs look like Burning Man attendees. Peter spends most of his time in silence, gazing at the furniture like it just insulted his haircut. You could set the entire house on fire and Peter’s dad would still speak in a calm monotone, offering feedback like a disinterested HR rep. The family dynamic is pure mid-’80s Canadian trauma: beige, muttered, and delivered through clenched teeth.
In a moment of what the film generously calls inspiration, Peter gets his hands on some therapy session footage from his family’s counseling group. There, he learns about an Armenian immigrant family—the Kassarians—who gave up their son for adoption 20 years earlier and are still raw about it. Peter, having the charisma of a dying fern and nothing better to do, decides to impersonate that long-lost son. Because when you’re bored in Canada, apparently identity theft is cheaper than going skiing.
So off he goes to invade the lives of the grieving Kassarians, led by a father who looks like he hasn’t smiled since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. They welcome him with open arms, proving that all you need to pass for Armenian in 1980s Toronto is a decent tan and the ability to fake sincerity like you’re running for student council.
Now, here’s where most movies would introduce tension, stakes, maybe a confrontation or—dare we say—a plot twist. But Next of Kin isn’t most movies. Egoyan, with the energy of a mime stuck in molasses, lets the film drift along like a half-deflated parade balloon. Peter integrates himself into the Kassarian household, learns how to operate their photo shop, eats dinner with them, and occasionally gazes wistfully into the middle distance as if he’s just remembered his parking spot expired.
No one questions this stranger’s paper-thin story. No DNA test. No raised eyebrows. Just blind, grief-fueled acceptance. It’s like they’ve been waiting twenty years for someone—anyone—to ring the doorbell and say, “Hi Dad, sorry I missed Christmas.” The whole setup plays out like a low-stakes Catch Me If You Can, minus the charisma, jet-setting, or even basic dramatic tension. And the closest thing to action is someone slightly raising their voice in a living room decorated like a cultural studies textbook.
The film tries to pass itself off as a meditation on identity, cultural displacement, and familial disconnection. In practice, it’s an hour and a half of people staring at each other across tables, intercut with VHS-quality footage of Peter looking like a guy who just got broken up with via fax machine. Dialogue is whispered like everyone’s afraid of waking up a sleeping toddler in the next room. Every line lands with the emotional weight of a tax audit.
Egoyan, bless his art-school heart, is already showcasing his favorite tricks: screens within screens, home video voyeurism, and characters so emotionally stunted they make mannequins look extroverted. The film wants to say something about the performative nature of family and how easily roles can be swapped, adopted, faked. But all it really proves is that anyone with a blank expression and a tragic backstory can crash your family dinner if you’re sad enough.
The performances are stiff, the pacing is glacial, and the soundtrack sounds like someone dropped a Casio keyboard in a snowbank. Patrick Tierney’s Peter is less a protagonist and more of a sentient shrug. His version of “emotionally conflicted” is blinking twice before finishing his sentence. The supporting cast, particularly the Kassarians, try their best, but they’re operating under the direction of a man clearly more interested in themes than human interaction. One can almost hear Egoyan behind the camera whispering, “Yes, yes, but subtextually—what does your silence mean?”
There’s also a subplot involving Peter’s therapist, who somehow doesn’t notice that her patient has gone full Single White Armenian on an unsuspecting family. Instead, she just keeps nodding and muttering clichés like, “You need to find your own way.” If that “way” involves deceiving traumatized immigrants, maybe stop handing out advice and start checking references.
Visually, the film looks like it was shot on a lunch break in overcast Toronto, which is to say: everything is beige, gray, or vaguely damp. The interiors are lifeless. The exteriors are unremarkable. The lighting says “Please don’t notice us,” and the editing seems performed by someone who fell asleep halfway through the timeline. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the movie was set in a dentist’s waiting room.
And then, just as you’re beginning to wonder whether this will all build to a climax—a confrontation, a reveal, a moment of truth—it ends. Not with a bang, not even a whimper, but with a resigned shuffle. Peter walks off into the city, a man transformed… or at least now slightly more confident in his ability to lie to strangers. The credits roll, and you’re left wondering what, if anything, just happened.
Next of Kin isn’t a film. It’s an act of quiet emotional vandalism. A slow-motion car crash where the car is never going faster than 5 miles an hour and the airbag never deploys. Egoyan may have later gone on to make The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica, and Ararat, but here he delivers a debut so mild, so bafflingly inert, it’s amazing the Canadian government didn’t just classify it as a form of emotional weather.
Final verdict? Next of Kin is a film about identity that has none. It’s a story about family told with all the warmth of a tax form. A cinematic ghost, haunting the video store shelves of 1984 like a forgotten VHS tape labeled “Maybe watch if nothing else is left.” Watch it only if you’ve run out of reasons to live—or if you want to remember what it felt like to be numb before the internet made it fashionable.