Next of Kin

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.