Parents' Guide to Kingdom of Us

This documentary pulls no punches in showing a family trying to maintain and move forward in the years following their father's suicide. The home videos of the past show a loving, creative, and playful father who is slowly succumbing to depression, whose obsessions with detail and documentation -- once applied toward creating a perfect family environment for him, his wife, and their seven children (five of whom are on the autism spectrum) -- grows increasingly dark as his erratic behavior grows worse. While a necessary documentary in the sense that the best documentaries reveal truths and universal experience, it's also, obviously, extremely depressing. Those who are in the earliest stages of the grieving process will find the emotional rawness too much to take, but for those further along, Kingdom of Us reveals the ways in which people cope or try to cope in the aftermath of suicide.

As Hollywood continues to churn out half-baked "high concepts" and inferior remakes of classic movies, it's refreshing -- if emotionally difficult -- to see a film trying for something beyond the demands of commerce and shallow escapism and spectacle. Kingdom of Us is certainly not entertainment by any stretch, and it's sometimes easy to forget that film is capable of so much more than safe formulas and done-to-death story structures. Like any art form, film can reveal the highs and lows of the human experience in a way that helps us to understand the world as much as ourselves, and Kingdom of Us does just that.