Every family that has ever made a film together has had the same argument at the same table, and Family Movie is the first one I know of to sell tickets to it. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick direct, with Dan Beers writing the concept they sparked to; their children Sosie and Travis Bacon act; and the conceit is a low-budget horror film about a family making a low-budget horror film, which is either the laziest idea in the world or the most honest, depending on whether you have ever had to cast your own cousin because the day rate was zero. It premiered at SXSW on a Friday the 13th, in the Narrative Spotlight, with Gersh selling and no distributor yet attached at the time Deadline wrote it up. Deadline loved it. AwardsWatch gave it a D+. I find both verdicts defensible and the gap between them more interesting than either, because the gap is exactly where micro-budget meta films live.
A pandemic idea, four years in the oven
The origin is the first production fact and the one that explains the rest. By Deadline’s account, the idea came in quarantine, a way for the couple to pull the clan closer in dark times, and the family then spent roughly four years merging, in the review’s phrase, the Bacon brigade into the horror genre. Four years for an eighty-one-minute film is not a schedule; it is a hobby that grew teeth, and that is worth saying without contempt, because the alternative, the one most of us chose during those years, was to make nothing. Bacon and Sedgwick had each directed the other before and had hired their kids for various functions in what Deadline calls, correctly, the family business. The film simply put the business on screen, tel quel.
The structure they chose is a producer’s structure, and I say that as praise. Bacon plays Jack Smith, the worst-reviewed director in the business, drowning in debt from one grisly cheap horror after another and forced by financing pressure to cast his immediate family in the next one. Sedgwick plays Ellen, the wife and perennial lead, past her best days as an actress and in it for love. Sosie Bacon plays the daughter who has just booked a real role in Vancouver and has to leave a half-finished shoot, so the family must finish fast. Note what the screenplay just did: it turned the oldest micro-budget emergency, a lead with a better job starting Monday, into the plot engine. Every reader of this site has lived that week. Then the neighbor (John Carroll Lynch, a professional at being the problem next door) ruins takes with his dog, Ellen goes over to negotiate, and negotiation becomes a body in the barn, and the film-within-the-film’s buckets of fake blood acquire one real one. AwardsWatch adds the family-drama substrate that the splatter sits on: a father hiding losses from his wife, a daughter auditioning outside the family, a son (Travis Bacon) who cannot earn his father’s trust behind the camera and drifts to MMA and a garage band. The slasher is the genre; the subject is a family business failing to transfer to the next generation.
Two kinds of meta film
There are two kinds of film about making cheap films. The first kind stands above the tier and mocks it, and its tell is that the film-within-the-film looks worse than the film we are watching. The second kind lives in the tier, and its tell is that you cannot always see the seam. AwardsWatch’s harshest charge, that Family Movie looks like it was shot for network television and not the big screen, is precisely the second kind’s occupational hazard, and the question a critic should ask is whether the look was chosen or merely suffered. On the evidence available I cannot settle that from a distance, and I will not pretend to. What I can say is that the film’s own premise makes the charge double-edged: a story about a man who turns out cheap grisly product has to decide how cheap its own surfaces are allowed to look, and a decision either way costs you one of the two reviews. Deadline, reading it as a sendup that keeps adding buckets of blood, forgave the surfaces; AwardsWatch, reading it as a feature asking for the big screen, did not.
The performances split the same way, which tells you the split is about the frame, not the acting. Deadline hands the scene-stealing role to Sedgwick (real comedic chops, in every sense of that word, the reviewer cannot resist adding) and finds the kids deliver on all counts, talent being inherited; AwardsWatch finds the same performances good, nothing to over-praise or criticize, and the film at its best only when all four are in frame together. Enfin, two critics agreeing that the family scenes are the asset and disagreeing about whether an asset is enough. The supporting bench, Jackie Earle Haley riotous by Deadline’s account, Liza Koshy, Andrea Savage, Scoot McNairy, is the kind of casting a Bacon can summon by phone and a first-timer cannot, and it is fair to count it as the real budget line of the production.
The verdict
Here is where I land, and it is a position, not a hedge. The premise is the film’s best scene. A real family playing a fictional family that makes films together, in a film they made together, is a genuine idea, and the daughter-leaving-for-Vancouver engine is a better micro-budget plot device than most micro-budget films ever find. AwardsWatch’s complaint that the idea runs out at the twenty-five-minute mark is the complaint one makes about gimmicks that are not yet films, and I suspect it is partly right, because four years of family labor is a condition that produces affection more reliably than it produces structure. But Deadline’s reading is not sentiment either: an eighty-one-minute horror comedy that keeps its gag alive, throws real blood into fake blood and lets Sedgwick loose is a winning entertainment by the standards of the tier it is explicitly about. Between a film that is too pleased to exist and a film that justifies its existence with every cut, this one sits closer to the first, and I would still rather see a family spend a pandemic on it than on nothing. The gimmick is the budget. Whether a gimmick can also be a film is the question the Vancouver job in the script was asking all along.
I checked a few of the particulars against Deadline’s SXSW notice and the AwardsWatch dispatch, and against the threads on r/movies.