Lily Brooke (Veronica Kedar) frantically arrives at her therapist’s house one evening demanding a session. The therapist is out but her bitchy teenage daughter Talia (Tommy Baremboem) is there and is willing to listen albeit in as judgmental a way as possible. Well, Lily needs someone to listen to her family problems, and Talia will have to do. Each of her family members are maladjusted in some way, a mother who succumbs to addiction, a father who lashes out violently, a brother who has uncomfortable incestuous feelings towards her, a sister who seems to be certifiably out of her mind. These all sound like pretty big issues, but the biggest issue of all is that Lily has just killed them all and needs to explain why.

We have seen quite a few films in the last decade introduce grim horror tropes as a metaphor for dealing with trauma. But few have done it in such a darkly sardonic way as Family. Indiepix on the back lists the film as Horror, Drama, but I think it does the movie a disservice in not highlighting the dark comedy that is laced throughout. Lily talks through her issues with her dead relatives, posing them for family photos to create a semblance of a normal happy family in death what they couldn’t give her in life. Using the bratty Talia is a nice use of a framing device as well, introducing a character that will play up the fucked up-ness of what Lily as done without immediately freaking out and calling the authorities. Talia also isn’t the sort that will give Lily an out to excuse what she has done. Despite the black humor and acerbic tone, Family also has moments of genuine pathos and sincerity that anchors the film. Kedar, doing triple duty here acting, writing and directing, does a great job in the lead role striking a perfect balance that if handled incorrectly could have hurtled the film into either campiness or overwrought melodrama.

Once again Indiepix gives a film only a DVD release. While Family isn’t what I would call a visual powerhouse of a film, it still would have been nice to see it in hi-def. As it is, the 480p image here is predictably soft and lacking definition but has no noticeable flaws in the transfer otherwise. The 2.0 stereo track sounds fine with no noticeable distortion but this isn’t the sort of film to give a system a work out either. The disc contains no extras.

Family is a darkly humorous but dramatically grounded story of familial dysfunction that works quite well, largely due to the deft acting work of Kedar and Baremboem. I wish Indiepix had released this on blu-ray but if you want to own this under seen dark comedy, this release is your best bet.