With a title like this, one can’t help but think they’re about to sit through yet another biography of a music legend, but it’s more than a pleasant surprise when it turns out to be anything but. British documentary maker James Marsh (The Burger & the King) embarks on his debut narrative feature with the help of acclaimed screenwriter Milo Addica (Monster's Ball), delivering a challenging tale of religious conviction and despicably immoral acts. Our protagonist, and ‘King’ of the title, is Elvis, played brilliantly by Gael García Bernal (Y tu mamá también, The Motorcycle Diaries). Here Elvis is a young man who takes honourable discharge from the Navy and heads to Corpus Christi in Texas to search for a father he never knew.

He comes across Pastor David Sandow (William Hurt – A History of Violence, Syriana), a good Christian man with a son Paul (Paul Dano), who plays Christian rock and advocates his father’s particular brand of conservative religious fervour, a beautiful wife (Laura Harring), and a daughter who drifts along unnoticed in her brother’s shadow. It is through the latter that Elvis pulls his moves and attempts to gain the acceptance of his father. His initial encounter with 16 year-old Malerie (Pell James) evokes Martin Sheen's courting of Sissy Spacek in a South Dakota front yard in Malick’s Badlands, Bernal here works his charm first at the church crèche and then in her front yard. With his hands at the wheel of a beat up Cougar, Elvis takes Malerie on a similar road of destruction, and his motives and methods are somewhat hard to palette. Unbeknownst to her, Elvis is the illegitimate child of a transaction between Pastor Sandow and a young Mexican woman in the years before his salvation and, with that fact indelibly evident from the word go, Elvis’s subsequent relationship with Malerie is disturbingly incestuous. Elvis’s depravity doesn’t end there, and suffice it to say that he stops at nothing to gain acceptance from his estranged father.

His evil actions challenge the limits of Sandow’s faith to the very extreme, and reigns destruction upon his perfect Christian life. They also present themselves as a major challenge to the audience, as no explanation for the extent of his evilness is given, and one is forced to enter the realms of disbelief. From the moment he arrives in Corpus Christi he is on a collision course with his father and it is a tempestuous journey that grips the viewer.

Bernal offers another truly outstanding performance in his depiction of Elvis, a complex individual capable of seamlessly juxtaposing moments of candid tenderness and intolerable cruelty. What’s more, he does all of this through his first performance in the English language, and has probably heralded the beginning of an illustrious career in Hollywood. William Hurt also excels in his role as Pastor Sandow and the rest of the cast deliver solid performances.

The King is a dark intriguing drama charting a tragic chain of events that challenge the audience on many levels. Eigil Byrld’s cinematography allows the story to progress at a moody pace and it combines brilliantly with the score from Max Avery Lichtenstein to restrain the enormity of the events, yet simultaneously heighten their impact. It is an open-ended commentary, not only on the nature of faith, but particularly that of staunch Christianity in America. The dark atmospheric shots of Texan oil tanks, the cold blooded slaying of a deer, and the championing of intelligent design leave one with much to discuss afterwards. The King is multi-layered film that will capture your thoughts long after you’ve left the cinema

Rated 18 (see IFCO website for details)
The King is released on 19th May 2006.