Must Read After My Death

Hours of Dictaphone tapes, reels of 8mm film footage, and boxes of photographs assemble this found-footage family tragedy. While life may have seemed normal between 1960s housewife Allis and her husband, Charley, it was anything but--as the couple's grandson, director Morgan Dews, discovered after their deaths, and shares in this unsettling documentary.

Told without narrators or onscreen interviews, MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH quilts together its disturbing family history using solely the material at DewÆs disposal. ItÆs a challenging approach that places viewers in a similar position as the director, poring through the artifacts of the dead and gradually piecing together the truth. It emerges slowly--grainy film stock shows children playing, a smiling wife, a husband. The voices are familiar, their stories ordinary. But the middle-class dream is punctured as Charley begins relating his amorous adventures, during his frequent travels abroad, to his wife. Along with the open marriage are AllisÆs revelations of her husbandÆs alcoholism and violent temper. As the toxic environment eats away at the family, eventually sending two of the boys to mental institutions, psychologists begin laying the blame on Allis for not fulfilling her duties as a wife. And itÆs here that the filmÆs construction, at time monotonous, shows its hand: trapping the viewer, like Allis, in an oppressive cultural landscape that is destructive, claustrophobic, and indomitable.

4.5 stars out of 5 -- "In the harrowing domestic saga MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH, Morgan Dews achieves the near-perfect confluence of form and content to communicate a slice of his family history." - Box Office

3.5 stars out of 4 -- "There is such raw pain here. Allis might have read or seen REVOLTIONARY ROAD and by comparison envied that marriage." - Chicago Sun-Times

"[A]n alternately fascinating and disquietingly intimate portrait of a 1960s American family falling apart." - New York Times

"Morgan Dews has fashioned his documentary with a historian's skill and an artist's eye....The film rises to the status of art thanks to the tension between horror that's heard and sweetness that's seen." - Wall Street Journal

"[A] searing and intimate account of an unconventional woman struggling not to lose her identity or sanity in the rigid 1950s suburban world....A story so compelling and so taut in its construction that it is virtually impossible to look away..." - Los Angeles Times

"[E]ntirely abosrbing....File this 'therapeutic' movie, well made and creepy, on the dysfunction-as-art shelf next to CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS." -- Grade: B+ - Entertainment Weekly

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