A gripping thriller straight out of real life, THE IMPOSTER is an original film experience that walks the razor’s edge between true-crime documentary and stylish noir mystery.
The twisting, turning tale begins with an unsettling disappearance – that of Nicholas Barclay, a 13 year-old Texas boy who vanishes without a trace. Three and a half years later, staggering news arrives: the boy has been found, thousands of miles from home in Spain, saying he survived a mind-boggling kidnap ordeal. His family is ecstatic to have him back no matter how strange the circumstances – but things become far stranger once he returns to Texas.
Director Bart Layton fuses confessional interviews and suspenseful storytelling into a film that asks the audience to play detective – as they ferret out the blurred evidence between a family who seems desperate to believe, a private investigator obsessed with resolution and a lonely thief whose only loot is human identities. Yet, just when it seems the puzzle of Nicholas Barclay has come together, another corkscrew twist turns everything upside down – and draws the audience deeper into THE IMPOSTER’S lacerating questions about truth, perception and why people are so tempted to pretend, to fib and, most of all, to fool ourselves.
