The Imposter

The Imposter (2012) is Bart Layton's stranger-than-fiction documentary, and you can watch online on iFILM. A thirteen-year-old boy vanishes from San Antonio, Texas, leaving nothing behind. More than three years later, a phone rings in Spain: he's alive. His family flies out to bring him home and asks almost nothing.

There's a catch. The returned boy has brown eyes where Nicholas had blue, a French accent, and the face of a grown man. He isn't Nicholas at all. He's Frédéric Bourdin, a serial impersonator who had slipped into other children's identities dozens of times. The truly unsettling part isn't how he fooled the authorities and the FBI; it's that the family took him in as their own. Layton lets Bourdin narrate the con himself, smug and chilling, then weaves slick reenactments into the real footage until you stop trusting either.

The longer it runs, the less it's about a fraud and the more it's about a family that may have found the lie easier to believe. The film swept the indie circuit and won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut. Anyone hooked on true crime and unreliable narrators should not miss it. Stream The Imposter (2012) online on iFILM.