Tom Kalin’s provocative but frustratingly shallow true-life portrait of the Baekeland family’s interpersonal debauchery certainly lives up to its marking hook, proving quite convincingly that “Truth is more shocking than fiction.” The film is indeed shocking, but Kalin doesn’t do much more than create an effectively discomfiting experience—a fly-on-the-wall view of human collapse that slowly draws you into a melodramatic downwards spiral that moves from cruelty to madness to incest and ultimately to murder. Julianne Moore gives a stunning, tortured performance, but the film’s fascination with grotesquerie far outweighs any humanistic interest in the characters’ tortured inner lives. (Angelika Film Center, Dallas, TX)