Critic Reviews

There is no simple solution. All Bad Axe offers is a portrait of an American family coming together in a time of conflict and what they can overcome when they stick together, and sometimes that's enough.

Bad Axe is a raw and stunning work of immediacy, a frontlines report from Trump country on the immigrant experience, family loyalty and community co-existence. It is not just among the finest and most important films of the year, but it will stand as a valuable historical and social document of these times.

Bad Axe really gets at how much the national anxiety of the 2020s broadened the chasms that already existed in our society, pushing politically different people against one another in ways that historians will debate for eternity.

While the documentary refrains from giving family members clear direction on how to mitigate their fears and anxieties, they have each other. That familial strength is what injects this poignant documentary with so much optimism.

It’s not a love letter to a Michigan town, but it’s a love letter to overcoming adversity with the help of family, of business, of identity.

At its best, Bad Axe is a family portrait, dynamic and curious and funny. It’s to Siev’s benefit that he belongs to one of the most charismatic families of all time, whose unending curiosity in each other and their respective wellbeing keeps the engine chugging along.

The intimate and remarkably relatable documentary that is "Bad Axe” takes its name from the rural Michigan town where Siev’s Cambodian refugee father and Mexican American mother raised a family and ran a restaurant; Bad Axe turned out to provide a tellingly relevant backdrop for the film.

It’s a simple film about complicated, often painful confirmations about the country we all call home, and about optimism for what that country can look like when people share it with each other; it’s about what happens when your worst nightmare come true; for Chun, it’s also about suffering a nightmare so dreadful that the foundational trauma of your youth seems preferable by comparison. But it’s especially about the way movies change the people who make them and the people who watch them. Bad Axe is a gift.

This is a family story – of a time, a place, an event, a community – in all its rich and quiet nuance, with all the members, related by blood or by affection, given their space.

Formally straightforward and heavily reliant on the perspective of the oldest sister, Jaclyn, Bad Axe (whose title comes from the name of the town) nevertheless serves as a reminder of how ugly things got during that crucial year—and how the American dream is an unjustly contingent one.