The Sacred Family (aka La Sagrada Familia/2005/Global Lens Collection/First Run Features DVD)

 

Picture: C-     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Main Program: C

 

 

Sebastian Campos’ The Sacred Family (aka La Sagrada Familia/2005) takes place during the Easter holiday and is a crew mix of drama, dark comedy, attempted irony, family issues and sexuality that starts more than it can finish and does not know where or how to finish.  The at least semi-functional family gets together, but son Marco has a new girlfriend Sofia, who he met while at college.  What would be a happy family meeting goes bad when Sofia goes into openness overdrive.

 

This makes the family uncomfortable and knowingly or not, Sofia wears thin too many of the ties that hold the family together, ones that have already been challenged by his leaving for higher education as so many issues are left unsolved.  This begins on Good Friday, which becomes bad for all and Campos does not know how to get the most out of the good and bad omens, which epitomizes where this goes wrong early.

 

Too bad, because there is territory here not covered enough, but the approach is too surface for its own good and the 99 minutes overall simply fall short of what could have been.

 

The letterboxed 1.85 X 1 looks awful, was shot in low def video of some kind, in the ever obnoxious and increasingly obsolete Dogme ’95 mode, though not that pretentious.  There is still too much shaky camerawork and the degraded image becomes annoying very quickly.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix is better, has its flaws, no surrounds and sonic limits, though dialogue recording and editing are not bad.  Extras include a profile of Chile, text director’s notes and text director’s biography.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo