Boy A

The story of a young ex-con Jack, newly released from serving a prison sentence for a murder he committed as a child.

An intriguing tragedy held together by a pair of remarkable performances, Boy A takes hold of a viewer in its opening scene and never lets go. Andrew Garfield (The Other Boleyn Girl) plays "Jack Burridge," a name chosen for him by a somewhat mysterious, avuncular fellow called Terry (Peter Mullan). Terry seems to be the only person to have maintained a relationship with Jack during the years the latter was incarcerated for a terrible crime he committed, with another child, as a boy. (Their misdeed is slowly revealed in detail through frequent flashbacks.) This British film, based on a novel by Jonathan Trigell and directed by John Crowley (Intermission), begins with Terry smoothing a path for Jack to re-enter the world with a new identity and fabricated personal history. Taking a delivery job in Manchester, Jack slowly learns about everything he missed while growing up in prison: how to order from a menu, how to be a friend, how to woo a woman. In time, Jack enjoys the esteem of co-workers and love of a compassionate girlfriend, Kelly (Siobhan Finneran). But the more he becomes part of the fabric of his world, the more he risks being exposed as a fraud. A strange, almost alien tension permeates Boy A. A viewer gets crucial information in bits and pieces, and a radical shift in one’s perception of what’s actually going on in the story awaits the audience in the second act. As betrayal and manipulation slowly emerge from behind layers of obfuscation and false assumptions, Boy A takes on an unexpected tone of psychological suspense. Crowley has a way of underscoring a sense of disconnection in seemingly benign scenes with only slight accents, little visual cues that are dreamily exotic but add up to a nightmare. --Tom Keogh