-By Eric Monder

For movie details, please click here.

Must Read After My Death, director Morgan Dews’ foray into the “primal scene” of his family’s dysfunction, reveals not only dark, painful personal truths, but also something profound and disturbing about American society in the recent past. What could have been exploitative or self-indulgent turns out to be moving and cathartic.

By piecing together the fragments of sounds and images left behind by his late grandmother, Allis, Dews finds some stark ugliness in his family’s background. This seemingly typical American family—Mom (Allis), Dad (Charles), and their children—lived in Hartford, Connecticut, in a nice suburban house in the 1960s. At first, the home-movie footage (which comprises nearly all the visuals of the 73-minute running time) suggests a happy and harmonious unit.

What is slowly exposed, however, both by the pictures and more so by Allis and Charles’ tape-recorded tracks, is a family in crisis. Everyone is unhappy and they act out their frustrations in different ways—Charles drinks, cheats on his wife and becomes violent, Allis becomes severely depressed, and the children either run away (in the case of Dews’ mother) or have emotional outbursts that land them in institutions. The recordings appear to have been made principally for the benefit of the family’s therapists, though, according to Allis, the psychologists and psychoanalysts only seem to aggravate a dire situation.

Though questions remain about just who did what and what happened and why, the suspense of Must Read After My Death comes from the slow drip of information, carefully and cleverly paced by Dews. Thankfully, he lets the material literally speak for itself. There are no talking heads or other interviews and only a few on-screen explanatory notes to fill the gaps between some of the audio sessions.

The story alone is worth experiencing simply as a compelling narrative. However, one also comes away from Must Read After My Death feeling one has witnessed first-hand the ills of a society that honors and values patriarchy over matriarchy and conformity over non-conformity. There is also some deserved criticism of the practices of professional psychologists and psychoanalysts.

Avant-garde filmmakers have used home movies in ingenious ways for years. Dews comes closer to this experimental aesthetic than any kind of traditional documentary style (though Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation beat him to it). By slowing the home-movie footage down and juxtaposing much of it with the words on the tapes, the director discovers a deeper meaning behind the placid façade. Paul Damian Hogan’s outstanding original musical score gives the whole piece an ominous feel.

Must Read After My Death is must see now!