Perhaps true family ties are only possible with someone else's family; that's the premise behind writer/director Atom Egoyan's disarming feature debut. The film itself is admittedly slim, running only 72 minutes and resting on the most slender thread of a plot, in which the disenchanted only son of an alienated Anglo Saxon household 'adopts' an Armenian family by posing as their long-lost son, becoming so enriched by the experience he decides to make it a permanent arrangement. Nothing much else happens, but Egoyan fleshes out the skeletal framework with plenty of tender, funny observations, minimizing the video-age pretensions that would mark his subsequent features. In this slight, engaging fable the director exhibits all the earmarks of an embryonic talent taking his first, assured steps.
Review of Next of Kin
