Aftermath

This movie examines the fact that people who were abused by their parents are much more likely to abuse their own children. It takes a look at a family (mom, dad, teenage daughter and younger son) going through a crisis as the daughter accuses her father of sexually abusing her. The story follows the mother's therapy sessions and through this we find out that dad was an abused child and later on in the film that this was also the case with the mother. It's a daring movie especially because the abuser is not hidden away as he is in so many other movies we've seen about the subject. Robert Urich plays him as a wounded man who knows he did a terrible thing, but doesn't know what he can do to make it right again. Every gesture he makes towards his daughter is misinterpreted. Yet he has to learn to live with himself, as he fights his own demons. Meridith Baxter Birney plays the mother who can't believe she didn't know the man she loved dearly was abusing their daughter. She comes to understand her circumstances as she cries out to her own mother when she realizes she has "forgotten" her own abuse. The movie on a whole is slow and shallow and the 'technique' of filming the mother's therapy sessions as interviews makes it look fake. The daughter's feeling are not looked at in depth, but the focus on the parents makes the message come across.