Beginning the day after Halloween (sometimes earlier) - and like it or not - I am buffeted about the head with the sights, sounds, and sales of Christmas.  Most people are fine with this, blindly groping for a plethora of gifts they give not out of love but out of obligation, mindlessly humming along to the soporific strains of pop-starlet-x-du jour's rendition of "White Christmas".  Well, I certainly can't deny that, for all my horror-film-loving, black-metal-listening leanings, I don't get a bit caught up in the season.  The season of light, of love, of hope; of family, old friendships made new, eggnog around the roaring fire and cheerful carols around a table of baked goods.  My film watching reflects this trend - my softening, if you will - and I always manage to catch It's a Wonderful Life on a tinsel-lit Christmas eve in the warmth of my parents' home in Victorian Dundas.  Similarly, the Rankin and Bass specials, Charlie Brown's Christmas, A Christmas Carol are all viewed with round, smiling faces, breaks taken to shuffle back to the kitchen for another pewter horn of mulled cider.  I'm sure your Christmas is the same.  But this year, I wanted to let you in on a little secret, a secret film, one which makes the holidays even brighter, brings families closer together, and which is destined to become a seasonal classic, taking its rightful place beside Alister Sim's crooked teeth in the Christmas Hall of Fame.  Yes, ladies and gentilhommes, that film is:

WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP

Best known for his Oscar award-winning documentary Man on Wire, James Marsh is the director of this slightly lesser lauded film, not quite documentary, not quite drama, sort of a recreation of events.  I think, however, it should be elevated in status above its award-winning sibling - it is an incredibly unusual film, gorgeously shot, perfectly scored, and dealing with some very strange, very macabre events.

Marsh uses Michael Lesy's controversial 1973 book of the same name as his jumping off point.  The book, which collected newspaper articles and period photographs from the town of Black River Falls, WI, circa the late-1800s, focuses mainly on the hardships of (mainly Scandinavian and German) settler life in the small city.  Marsh goes one further and sets out to recreate the landscape and events chronicled in the newspaper articles, and the film grows increasingly stranger in both subject matter and style as it wears on.

Shot in rich, starkly contrasting black and white, the film's look recalls certain Ansel Adams photos or the work of Alfred Stieglitz.  It is the dramatization of the town's descent into hell that ultimately gives the film its power - this is not simply a monotone voiceover paired with photographic stills, but a living breathing past, a dark past.  Accompanying the reenactments, Ian Holm skillfully intones the narrative while we see a variety of people performing unspeakable acts, and the overall effect is chilling and riveting.  Children kill innocent adults without remorse; a schoolteacher is addicted to vandalism and cocaine; men murder their wives, then themselves; mothers drown their children; a woman is buried alive, while in a trance, and the coffin is opened to a most grisly discovery; a once-famous European opera star begins having visions of ghosts and dark forces before being admitted into the insane asylum, and on, and on...

There are also colour inserts that show present day Black River Falls, a place that is so ordinary it is beyond sad.  Clearly the filmmakers are showing the mundane existence of the present day citizens to highlight the insanity of the past.  I wonder if the kind of hysteria that occurred in Black River Falls was mirrored in the rest of the country's rural areas at the same time, or if the madness, murder and mayhem was restricted to this particularly idyllic setting?

The film is wholly unique and really deserves to be seen.  So, um, see it.  Yule love it.