Now here's a change of pace. Usually, when a distributor chooses not to show a movie to critics it's because it's so craptacular they want to keep word of mouth at bay.

In the case of Boy A, which slipped quietly into a single Toronto-area theatre yesterday (the AMC Dundas Square), they apparently swept it under the rug because it was too good.

Thought-provoking, powerful, sad and boasting a central performance that won a BAFTA (British Oscar) for its star Andrew Garfield, Boy A is inspired by the controversial case of two 10-year-old killers who murdered a younger boy in England in 1993. Is a 10-year-old "evil?" If so, does he remain evil or is it something he can leave behind as an adult?

When we meet Eric (Garfield), one of two infamous "killer-children," he's being released at age 24 -- 14 years later -- to a new life and a new identity, almost as an act of birth. The entire world is new to him. He doesn't know how to order at a restaurant. He doesn't know what a DVD is.

And yet, under the tutelage of his counsellor Terry (played with depth by Peter Mullan), he constructs a life that is so at odds with the one he knew as a child, it truly is a case of two separate identities. We see as much in flashbacks, to his brutish, alcoholic dad, his cancer-stricken mom, and his sociopathic best friend Philip (Taylor Doherty), who himself is subject to regular sexual abuse by his older brother.

Cut to the present, and Eric, renamed Jack Burridge, becomes what Terry calls his "greatest achievement." He finds work at a factory in Manchester, where he quickly becomes a popular employee, finds a new, regular-bloke best friend named Chris (Shaun Evans) and falls in blissfully requited love with the office secretary Michelle (Katie Lyons). He even, at one point, gets to play hero.

Could someone leading such an idyllic existence really be the "monster" that the tabloids fulminate over when word gets out that "Evil" is living among us? To its credit, Boy A is one of the few movies that ever takes the elephantine presence of the media into account in its storytelling (as opposed to most Hollywood movies, where you can have a gun battle in the middle of a downtown metropolis and it apparently won't even make the evening news). As if the nightmares and flashbacks aren't enough baggage for Jack to carry into his blue-collar Neverland, he must read about himself in the papers and live with a $20,000 bounty on his head, posted on the Internet by vigilantes.

As deftly pieced together by director John Crowley, there is a melancholy inevitability to the proceedings -- the flashbacks of Eric's life and eventual fraying of the ends of Jack's coming together. Meanwhile, Terry -- Jack's ostensible angel -- has his own troubles of the soul that can't help but impact Jack.

Boy A is the kind of movie that falls victim to the new role of multiplex as babysitter of teenagers. Its life in the theatres will be short (it already aired as a TV movie in Britain), but for the few that find it now (or later on video) it will be worth it.

(This film is rated 14-A)
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