"You Still Like Those Crackers"

lavatch

Little Mitchell Harris was abducted as a child when his parents were not paying attention at the lake for forty seconds. Years later, an adolescent boy returns to claim that he is Mitchell arriving home. To the viewer, it is obvious that the kid is an imposter. But to the loving parents who desperately want to believe that he is their son, they are unable to lucidly embrace the truth when it is in front of their faces.

There is a revealing moment when the mother, Laura, watches the imposter munching and says, "You still like those crackers." To the mom, this was projection rather than a rational appraisal of the son. The imposter was a brilliant actor, who could turn on the charm and, above all, the emotion to cleverly manipulate the mom and dad.

In the first quarter of the film, it was easy to feel the anguish of Laura and Greg Harris, whose lives were irrevocably changed by the loss of their little boy. But for the final three-quarters of the film, their unwillingness to confront the erratic behavior of the false Mitchell had life-damaging consequences for the other family members.

When the imposter arrived, there was a plan to get the boy into therapy and to conduct a DNA test. After the imposter switched his cotton swab sample with that of little Jonathan, he bought himself some time. But once Laura learned that the kid had manipulated the DNA results, she failed to follow through with a thorough investigation into the kid's identity. An obvious choice would have been to examine dental records, but that never happened.

It was frustrating to watch the Harris family implode due to the imposter. It should have been clear to the parents that the boy was a phony, and he should have been sitting in a juvenile detention center by the midpoint of the film.

score /10

lavatch 15 January 2020

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5409614/