MUBI

Not since Dreyer’s Day of Wrath has such a rapturous, stark and openly, frankly Godless depiction of familial crisis, existential isolation, the boundaries between truth and Truth, and the slipperiness of identity ever been made—both the tale itself and its execution in the movie, regarding the crumbling of the Friedman family after a wildly growing, unfolding and frightening series of child pornography and pedophilia allegations are thrown at the father (Alan Friedman) and youngest son (Jesse Friedman) of the family, is cold, labyrinthine, alien in its impact, both emotionally and morally, with its odd, complex, polarizing depiction of and within the collective conscious and pulse of the American media, the impeccably conceived nuclear family, and the sensitive and ugly landscape of pedophilia, the law, life and the Cronenbergian obsession with the unbearable, explosive mysteries and obscurity of a Human Being and all the discomfort, difficulty and self-conscious doubt that come along with that title. It’s fragile, dark, and it’s one long, dreamlike, troubling and challenging noose around the perfect, calculated and structured American Dream—an unsettling, uncomfortable, astonishingly profound and humbling document of the slow, foggy deconstruction of fatherhood, motherhood, childhood and familyhood, the press and advocating media, like some horribly literal-minded, sober and clear document of a house of mirrors via David Lynch.