To witness the disintegration of the American Dream without the veneer of comfort that fiction offers is to watch “Must Read After My Death,” a haunting documentary by Morgan Dews. Families who appear to live on the edge of cloud nine who are actually freefalling into an inevitable demise are those that can be traced throughout entertainment’s historical timeline, but watching such a family knowing that the story is true allows it to take on a far more chilling atmosphere.

When director Morgan Dews’ maternal grandmother Allis passed away in 2001, she left behind eight-millimetre homemade films, Dictaphone records and photographs, in the hundreds. Using those selected fragments of his family’s history, Dews assembled something of an intimate, haunting collage of a family breaking apart, showing each crack, frayed edge and tear with the glue holding it together slowly but surely failing.

Without forcing himself into the foreground, Dews dictates the flow of his most curious film, allowing moments to linger and hover in the mind as well as allowing other elements only to become apparent on subsequent viewings. In that regard, “Must Read After My Death” is similar to a work of art, made up of bits and pieces of time and space which mean little in isolation but interwoven, they remind us of the dark tinges of unhappiness that strike even the most ordinary of families.

Allis, as evident in the documentary, was a deeply unhappy women born into a time that she didn’t agree with, and it didn’t agree with her either. She didn’t fit the housewife mold, or the doting, perfect mother figure. Her husband, Charley, spent months on end travelling leaving Allis no choice but to take on a role she didn’t intend on baring; being the sole caretaker of her four children.

As a means of communication whilst Charley was out of town, the couple would record messages for one another – which later morphed into a means of recording each step of the couple’s descent into a pit of pain, failure and unaffected scorn. These recordings, bathed in words unsaid and pain unleashed, are the heart of the film that beat and pulsate even at times when the contemplations within them are achingly silent.

While keeping their fingers on the record button, Allis and Charley’s marriage continued to erode. Their children grew up; started thinking up their own hopes and dreams and all the while Dews guides us through various blimps of tragedy and heartache on his family’s radar without hinting at anything but narrative purity.

The frank footage Dews chooses to exhibit makes the impact it does because we know that when it was filmed, there was never an intention of creating it with a larger audience in mind, and it is devoid of vanity. Thematically, the doc covers nothing that we haven’t heard before, more or less, but because it isn’t fictional and it’s raw, natural quality makes it feel oddly urgent even though it traces, for me at least, near ancient history.

Instead of the usual tactics that dramatists and to a lesser extent documentary filmmakers use to manipulate their stories for the greatest possible dramatic effect, here Dews seems to have crafted his portrait as a way to piece together fragments of a mystery in order to understand that which he had never before.

As disturbing and negative as it is, “Must Read After My Death” is a quiet, harrowing verification that despite the flaws a family may or may not exhibit (flaws even still), life goes on and each generation in succession is offered an opportunity to tell its own story. In fact, anyone with a turbulent family history and an archive as extensive as Dews was afforded could have made their own version of this documentary, but I doubt the results would have been quite as seamless.

As we have become accustom to watching others live their lives in the public eye, some might argue that the documentary is an exploitation of the family’s privacy – and one may wonder whether Dews’ grandmother would have approved of these rich, explosive familial artefacts making their way into a public domain. Regardless, they have and a dark, vivid portrait with the slightest tinge of optimism results; a relatively fascinating yet imperfect piece of confessional art.

Fatac Rating: ***½

Must Read After My Death. Written, Directed and Edited by Morgan Dews. Running Time: 74 minutes. Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars. [B-]