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Adoration

• Written and directed by Atom Egoyan
• Starring Devon Bostick, Arsinée Khanjian, Scott Speedman, Rachel Blanchard and Noam Jenkins
• Classification: 14A

Halfway through Atom Egoyan's new film Adoration , its unhappy young protagonist caresses his late mother's violin and, as he attempts to justify terrorism, suggests it is sometimes easier to relate to things than to people. His best friend is outraged, and takes this as further proof that the boy she knows is slipping away from her. However, while she's at it, she also angrily points out the irony: In this context, she herself is a thing to which he is relating, an image on a screen, since their conversation is taking place by video link.

This is the apogee of Adoration , the point at which Egoyan's career-long examination of how communication technology promotes alienation makes its strongest statement as the director returns to themes so startlingly featured in early films such as Family Viewing and The Adjuster . It's a cerebral exercise, however, and as the film moves from there into a more conventional – if not entirely plausible – family drama, it becomes less artificial yet, paradoxically, less interesting.

The protagonist is Simon (Devon Bostick), a Toronto high-school student who reacts viscerally to a French-class dictation of a news article about a foiled act of terrorism, in which a man used his pregnant wife to carry explosives onto an Israeli plane, because it reflects his own family history. Living with his angry and potentially racist uncle (Scott Speedman), Simon is an orphan whose dying grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) has told him that his Middle Eastern father was a murderer who destroyed the family, killing himself and Simon's gentle, musical mother. Encouraged by his Lebanese teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) to explore the terrorism article as a dramatic monologue, Simon identifies himself as the child with whom the terrorist's fiancée was pregnant and, as his confession goes viral, becomes embroiled in a massive Internet controversy in which he attempts to understand and justify his father's actions.

Adoration becomes gripping as Egoyan toys brilliantly with his audience's understanding of Simon's history and his father's role, slowly but surely revealing how closely the terrorism story mimics his past while cleverly satirizing the sentimentality, self-satisfaction and pure hatred that can pass as debate on the Internet. At this point, it is easy to forgive the director his outlandish flourishes: To test the uncle's tolerance, Sabine appears to him on a winter evening as a Muslim woman, not merely veiled but wearing a decorative mask of interlocking metal plates. Dressed like some medieval Bedouin and standing beside a suburban Christmas tree, she creates a show-stopping image of cultural division, but it's hardly the way to infuse plausibility into the character's already bizarre behaviour.

Khanjian, whose habitual air of exotic remove can make her screen acting seem merely wooden, does a lovely job here of suggesting Sabine's emotional distance from Canadian experience, creating an isolation that makes her odd scheming – she is effectively stalking Simon – more believable. Similarly, Bostick is wonderfully sympathetic as the confused and grieving Simon, playing out supposed ethical dilemmas with the false rationalism of the adolescent because that's easier than facing his real emotional pain.

The warmth of the performances is key because it is often difficult to care about these people, even as the director departs from his intellectual construct into Simon's actual history. It's a rather clichéd story of the wealthy grandfather's predictable prejudices played out in flashbacks performed by Rachel Blanchard as the lovely violinist, Noam Jenkins as her exotic Middle Eastern love and an underused Welsh as the rigid patriarch.

Once again, Egoyan has created a film that descends from ideas rather than experience, driven by theme rather than character, and he does both very well. His ability to render his themes as cinematic images can be breathtaking: Simon's WASP family cherishes a series of beautifully painted Christmas figures depicting the Adoration of the Magi (hence the film's title), which the boy eventually burns.

But can we swallow the symbol? It matters because, if we do not always feel for these characters, despite the strength of the performances, it is because we cannot always believe their motivations. And if we do not believe their motivations – if we do not think people in the world actually act this way – then all our puzzling over their dilemmas becomes as pointless as the hypothetical arguments in Simon's appalling chat room.