Fraud (Dean Fleischer-Camp, 2016): USA

Reviewed by Emma Thorstensen. Viewed at AFI Fest, 2016.

A real headache presented by director Dean Fleischer-Camp. As an idea of collecting found footage and creating a documentary about this lower-middle-class American family who’s willing to burn down their house and commit fraud to receive enough money to have them live a luxury life on the road, this could actually sound like something that would lead somewhere and surely while presenting the idea, it must have sounded good at the time.

To quote Variety this film would ”conceptually sophisticated documentary territory with a film that, despite frenetic cutting and a lean runtime, rewards contemplation and patience.”

No, even with the hectic rough cutting and jump cuts throughout the entire ”film”, it was still extremely slow paced which mainly contained footage of the wife’s behind. The scenes that were longer than 3-5 seconds long can be counted on one hand and it was painful to watch the children be taught that this is a normal behavior to commit fraud and having to live on the run all the time. Not once did the children question what was going on and it just makes you wonder what really happened to them since the film won’t even establish that.

The duration of the movie consists 52 minutes of footage leading nowhere. You follow this family who’s already out of hope while getting themselves into an even more hopeless situation. However it was a perfect creation for triggering a good migraine.

 


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