TIFF Review: ACOLYTES

Take a quick glance at the synopsis for Jon Hewitt’s Acolytes and you’ll think you’ve got the film all figured out. Abused teens stumble across evidence of a killer and rather than calling the police opt to blackmail the killer into taking out their abuser. Seems simple, yes? Think you know where it’s going, yes? You don’t.

Mark, James and Chasely are a typical enough trio of high school teens living in suburban Australia. James is the natural leader, full of brash confidence and swagger. Mark, the more attentive one, quieter and more timid. And Chasely, the beautiful, artistic girl who is the object of their affections. James has got her, Mark wants her, and Chasely casually keeps both at her beck and call. Life would be idyllic if not for the Missing Person posters plastered all around town and the presence of Parker, a twenty-something thug who clearly has history with both James and Mark.

When a day spent cutting class leads to Mark stumbling across a body buried in the woods, the correct course of action seems obvious. Since Mark saw enough of the killer to track him down, they should call the police and turn him in. But, for some reason, they hesitate. Parker is back in town, there is a score to settle, and James is hungry for vengeance. Just think how easy it would be to track the killer down themselves and turn him on their nemesis …

Acolytes is very much one of those films that wraps its strengths and weakness up into one interconnected package. One great strength is the way it confounds expectations, becoming much more than you would expect going in. The flip side to this, however, is that in the course of confounding those expectations it plays out rather slowly in the early going. Rather than going for the throat Hewitt opts to laze his way through the opening act and establish a realistic relationship between its three young leads, the actual blackmail element not entering the film until half way through its run time. That realism, again, proves to be one of the film’s great strengths, adding a good amount of oomph to the eventual payoff but early on it simply reminds that teenagers really aren’t that interesting to anyone other than themselves, their one fascinating trait being their tendency to make spectacularly bad decisions. Once those decisions start piling up the film begins to twist and turn but it takes a little patience to get to that point.

Beautifully shot and wickedly smart in execution Acolytes is driven by powerhouse performances from its two adult leads, the seemingly omnipresent Joel Edgerton – you can count on seeing either him or his brother in the credits of virtually every smart genre oriented film coming out of Australia right now – as the blackmailed killer and Michael Dorman as Parker. Both deliver fierce, magnetic, carefully nuanced performances in very demanding roles and both are brilliant. Edgerton is already a known quantity but this could very well end up being a star-making turn for the lesser known Dorman. The young stars are a bit more of a mixed bag. Sebastian Gregory – who could easily be Elijah Wood’s lost younger brother – shows the most promise and Hanna Mangan-Lawrence is solid as Chasely but Joshua Payne is too prone to simply posture in his part as James.