In New York, the six Angulo brothers and their older sister live with their parents in a Lower East Side apartment that they are not allowed to leave because their parents feel the world beyond is unsafe. Home-schooled, they go outside only once or twice a year under strict supervision.
As director Crystal Moselle shows, their isolation has resulted not only in a profoundly intense family dynamic, but in the brothers’ burgeoning imaginations and necessarily consuming cultural obsessions.
Film is their shared passion and, unable to explore the world themselves, they do so via the medium of cinema, making endless lists of films, staging elaborate recreations of their favourites scenes (one involving a frankly superb Batman costume created from cereal boxes and yoga mats) and memorising dialogue.
Their inexperience of the world is so profound that when they finally start to get a taste of freedom, the expectations they’ve built up through film-watching don’t always translate to reality; but they are nevertheless determined to escape the prison their father has constructed and leave their inner worlds for the real one.
Reminiscent of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans in its portrait of familial dysfunction, this is an astonishing, haunting and very moving documentary, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2015, and demands to be seen.
Not since Grey Gardens has a film invited us into such a strange, barely-functioning home and allowed us to gawk without reservation.
Jordan Hoffman, Guardian
*****
