The Sloane Affair
1972 · 53m · Canada
Directed by Douglas Jackson
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, tense
Revenue investigators pursue suspected income-tax evasion by a prosperous building contractor, in a fictionalised drama drawn from Department of National Revenue case files that builds suspense around the inquiry and the people drawn into it.
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A procedural thriller built from actual tax-evasion case files should be a snooze, but Jackson turns bureaucratic drudgery into genuine suspense—the subversion is that nothing explosive happens, yet you're riveted anyway.
The Sloane Affair belongs to a dignified lineage of institutional procedurals and Canadian realist cinema; its formal restraint and commitment to the texture of official inquiry over melodrama mark it as craft aware of its own tradition.
Jackson's decision to let tension accumulate through accumulation—paperwork, interviews, small contradictions—rather than manufactured plot turns is the move that elevates this from a civics lesson into something genuinely taut.