By Peter Covino

Lifestyles Editor

It doesn’t take long for almost all those involved in the documentary, The Imposter, to get creepy.

This real-life film has a bit of the Catch me if you Can factor as well as another recent popular documentary Catfish in it, but The Imposter also manages to hold its own quite nicely.

Director Bart Layton (of TV’s Locked up Abroad) follows the trail of a family who back in 1994 reported their 13-year-old son missing. Three years later, they get a report from Spain that apparently their son is alive and well.

There is only one slight problem: the boy they have in custody has the wrong color eyes, looks a lot older than 16 and English does not seem to be his native language.

Layton interviews various family members — mother, sister etc. as well as the “boy” in question, who is now about 40, who almost straight off says, he made the whole thing up to get out of his environment.

Picking the Texas family was kind of a random choice, with a little bit of help from a missing children center in the United States. He feared being discovered as a fraud by authorities, and doing a little research on his own, chose the Texas family as his own.

The authorities need confirmation before they can give the boy an American passport, so his older sister makes the trip to Spain, and despite all the inconsistencies, is soon hugging him and ready to bring him back as the long-lost brother and son.

The kid is soon home with his family restarting his life in Texas, but soon others are expressing doubts about his story, including an FBI agent in charged of investigating such things and a private investigator for the TV series Hard Copy.

Separately they arrive at their own conclusion: the boy is a fake, and what really happened to the 13-year old and why is this family so eager to accept him, despite so many dissimilarities.

Could there be something else sinister in play, like maybe someone in the family is responsible for his death?

The Imposter is a documentary for those who don’t particularly like documentaries.

The film won trophies at the British Independent Film Awards (including Best Documentary) and was nominated for British film of the Year and Documentary of the Year by the London Film Critics Awards.

It also was an official selection at the Sundance and SXSW Film Festivals

The Imposter  is rated R for language and has a running time of 99 minutes.

The film debuts on DVD Tuesday. It also is available for download via iTunes.

To view the trailer go to http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/theimposter/.