When Atom Egoyan’s Adoration premiered at Cannes last year, the buzz was that this film marked a return to his early work.

True enough, I suppose. Once again, the themes are broken families, buried secrets, unknowable tragic events and a fetish for video. And Adoration finds Egoyan still employing the time-jumping editing scheme he’s used on every one of his films since Exotica, whether the story needs it or not.

But all the film’s fractured chronology does is further obscure an already murky narrative about a Toronto teenager (Devon Bostick) who claims he has a personal connection to the attempted bombing of an El Al flight, telling his classmates his father was the terrorist who tried to send his pregnant girlfriend onto the plane with a bomb in her luggage.

There’s also some utter bollocks about the boy’s uncle (Scott Speedman) being shown the error of his prejudiced ways by the kid’s teacher (Arsinée Khanjian, who’s excruciatingly bad in an unplayable role).

For a decade now, Egoyan’s films have offered little more than arch, suffocating gamesmanship, and Adoration is more of the same – the same stiff performances and pompous dialogue, the same inability to build believable human motivations around the weighty metaphor with which he thinks he’s working.

Adoration is exasperating, exhausting nonsense, for acolytes only.