Family Viewing

A film set in Canada. Van is in his twenties. He lives in the same flat as his father and his father's girlfriend. The house is cold. Nobody really talks to anybody. The father has a habit. He records over the old family videos; he films his own sexual encounters and reuses the tapes. Van notices. His childhood is being erased one piece at a time. His grandmother is in a care home. She does not speak, does not move, and nobody visits her. Van goes and sits with her. From there the film becomes a story of rescue. Van wants to get the old woman out. His helper is Aline. She works a telephone line; she talks to men and is paid. Van's father is one of the men who calls that line. The narrative builds this not as coincidence but as part of a system. A plan is made. A funeral, an exchange of identity, and an abduction. What the narrative is interested in is not family but recording: its idea is that a family destroys its own past by writing over it, and that remembering becomes a matter of tape. The mother left years ago. Where she went is never said, and her traces on the tape have been erased too. The form is cold. Some scenes are given directly as video and the picture quality is deliberately poor. So is the sound. At one point the narrative uses a television laugh track and the scene becomes unbearable. This is Atom Egoyan's second feature and the main themes of his later work are set here. David Hemblen, Aidan Tierney, Gabrielle Rose and Arsinée Khanjian are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1980s Canadian independent cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: anyone looking for warmth and explanation; the narrative is distanced, some connections are never made, and the low budget shows in every frame.