CIFF 2012: Black Pond

A mockumentary style movie about a family who was accused of killing a stranger and burying him. As we see in the film, this does not appear to be so. A dysfunctional family of four, parents and two 20-something daughters who live away from home, are interviewed after the fact. An innocuous stranger whom the husband meets is invited to an isolated home for tea, then dinner, then a swim, then to stay the night. The stranger tells a tale about the nearby pond, where he claims a woman died.

The next morning the stranger rushes in to tell them their dog died of an accidental drowning but there is a bit of suspicion that he may have actually killed it.

There is also a male friend of the daughters who is also interviewed and in a twisting of the facts, the family believes he ratted them out and got them arrested. He actually went to a weirdo therapist to help him work out his feelings, as he is in love with both the sisters, who could care less about him. The therapist seems to be the one to have passed on this news and made it public, as the stranger's death was not the family's fault and they, out of respect, only buried him.

The parental couple are also going through their own romantic dissolution, as the wife thinks the husband doesn't understand her. He finds some old poetry of hers which he has never seen, which she eventually admits were cries of help pertaining to suicide.

I went in to this forgetting it was a mockumentary and thought it was a thriller type film at first. The humor is pretty dry and black-comedyish and for me took a bit of getting acclimated. It is not a "ha ha" kind of humor, and not necessarily something I would watch again. But it does have some thoughtful ideas about depression and suicide. The actor who played the sisters' friend was a co-writer and co-director of this movie. The actor who played the husband/father I think was the best, as his goofy character had to be balanced between an oddball as well as some poignancy. The mother/wife character in contrast was more obvious in what she was supposed to be.