The riveting upstate New York documen tary “October Country” could have been titled “Family: A Horror Story.”
“October Country” doesn’t really have a point, or a story, but it’s an almost unbearably vivid portrait of four generations in a single working-class family, the Moshers. Dottie, the oldest woman, and her husband Don raised a daughter, Donna, as well as Donna’s daughter Daneal when Donna proved unable to cope with motherhood and passed the child on to her parents.
Daneal, still a teen, already has a baby of her own, Ruby, and a troublesome boyfriend who is not the little girl’s father.
Dottie wearily notes the presence of “cycles . . . it’s generation after generation till something comes along to break it.” She, Donna and Daneal are beset by despicable men they alternately castigate and forgive. Dottie’s foster son, Chris, a junior-varsity Eminem in dyed hair and sideways baseball caps, is a loose-limbed thief who robs Dottie and Don.
Meanwhile, Don’s sister is a self-proclaimed witch who spends her life trying to take photographs of paranormal activity while contentedly passing the days on public assistance in a house full of unicorn figurines and shelf-size wizards.
The only thing she and Don have in common is a belief in ghosts: He served in Vietnam, and bloody spirits have infested his dreams ever since. He can’t go to fireworks displays because the noises remind him of more lethal explosions and fallen comrades.
One of the Mosher siblings, Donal, co-directed the film; perhaps only a family member could have taken us so penetratingly into its desolation. The details are as excruciating as the ones in documentaries like “Capturing the Friedmans,” fraught with bleak black humor and disarming self-knowledge.
Daneal’s half-sister Desi says, matter-of-factly, “I trusted my dad. But I don’t anymore.” Pause. “Because he’s in jail.” Pause. “For child molestation.”
Later, Chris brings the filmmakers to the local Wal-Mart where, on camera and in the presence of his foster mother, he explains his shoplifting techniques. “I’m gonna get a phone call saying he’s in jail or he’s dead,” says Dottie. “It’s inevitable.”
The film builds to a climax of sorts when Dottie struggles to gather the family for one holiday that seems especially promising: Halloween. “If they come in disguise,” she figures, “they don’t even have to admit that they really came here.”
The movie doesn’t suggest solutions, doesn’t present a mystery to be solved, doesn’t even much wonder about root causes. “October Country” is a depressing work. But its sorrows are affecting. As the matriarch of another shattered family once said, attention must be paid.