Critic Reviews

The film is about effects--about anger and guilt, pain and exasperation. It's about that "wish to remember" and also to know, or even just to be able to live with not knowing.

[Garbus] packages it well in a film that's like a more meticulous and dignified version of one of those network television prime-time crime compendiums--a "48 Hours Mystery" with more heart and brain.

Ostensibly an objective inquiry into the tragedy, the film is perhaps better interpreted as a study in the infinite and even seemingly inappropriate ways that people experience profound grief.

It's an exhaustive and exhausting film, but Garbus finds nothing that will change minds or reverse conclusions. The tragic void remains.

Mostly, though, all the evidence together doesn't add up to an answer. Whatever went wrong with Aunt Diane that day, we don't know and may never know.