My Uncle left for WWI thinking he was off to a great adventure. Like every other member of our family since the Revolution, he wanted to serve his country and his people. However, when he came home, he brought a chest full of the highest military medals and a bad case of PTSD. He was still repeating the aphorism that war was months of boredom interrupted by moments of terror decades later, and he said that, eventually, he only remembered the terror.
In this heart wrenching documentary, the parents of a teenaged boy and girl come home to find their daughter shot to death in their basement. They slowly piece together that their son is responsible, and the rest of the film is how they learn to deal with the new normal.
Never have I seen a documentary that focused on the tedium of despair, but anyone who has ever lost someone to a sudden death knows exactly what that means. The terror of loss is immediate and overwhelming, but then comes the numbing dullness of cleaning up the death site, arranging the funeral, etc. The trouble comes afterward, when there is nothing concrete to do but to mentally break down what happened again and again.
As in war, it can take months or years to break down and understand what happened. When the sudden death is caused by a family member, the denial is so much stronger than reality. It has its own kind of PTSD.
The film maker here spares nothing in showing the audience how a family problem ignored becomes a family tragedy. Parents love their kids, even when their kids are sociopaths. A family will seek some kind of normalcy, even in the agony of loss, and it will do so because the terror is just beneath the surface.
Also, Mason needs to stay in prison.
