Evil Out Of Focus: Our Review of ‘Rewind’

Posted in Movies, VOD/iTunes/DigitalDownload by - May 08, 2020
Evil Out Of Focus: Our Review of ‘Rewind’

From Capturing the Friedmans to Deliver Us From Evil to Leaving Neverland, the realities of child sexual abuse have been urgently recounted in documentary form for at least a couple of decades now. Perhaps no other film, however, has been as deeply personal in exploring this horror as Rewind, director Sasha Joseph Neulinger’s fraught attempt to look back at his own history of abuse, in order to hopefully find a way to come to terms with it.

A former child actor (he had small roles in Unbreakable and as the younger version of Jack Black’s character in Shallow Hal), Sasha Neulinger was raised in Philadelphia alongside his younger sister in what initially seemed like a fairly normal family situation. His father, a television director, would habitually film everything and what emerges from these recordings are typically blasé gatherings of their tight-knit extended family. But underneath that façade, a sickness was thriving, causing a young Sasha to violently lash out and attempt suicide on a number of occasions. This is because Sasha and his sister were being consistently abused by no less than three different family members, while they were both still under the age of ten.

If you were reading the news in the mid-2000s, you may remember the “Cantor Sex Abuse” trial that captured the media’s attention for several weeks, where Howard Nevison, a prominent opera singer and well-loved cantor in New York’s high society Jewish community, was charged with sexual abuse of a minor. This was Sasha’s case, and even though he solidly testified against his uncle Howard, a plea bargain was eventually struck to let him off lightly.

Now as an adult, Sasha aims to reckon with his past, even though the case itself is long dead and buried, using the copious amounts of video footage from his youth as a starting point. Then, interviewing both of his since-divorced parents, he tries to understand what their head spaces were at the time, while also gleaning further context from the psychiatrist, chief detective, and lead prosecutor that all played first-hand roles in the investigation. This all takes Sasha on an arduous journey back to a time that he’d rather forget but knows that he can’t, eventually reckoning with his family’s demons so that he can move on. And as is common with many of these types of cases, Sasha’s inquiry ultimately serves to uncover even deeper cycles of abuse that stretch back through his own father’s upbringing.

As a documentary, Rewind might not contain much that we haven’t already been painfully attuned to; but as a project of self-therapy for the filmmaker, it’s hard to doubt its inherent power. The film brings to mind the disturbing intimacy of something like Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, but even that was from a perspective one step removed. Like a bad dream, Sasha slips right back into his childhood through the old video footage, with the audience standing by as horrified witnesses.

The most shocking aspect of Rewind may just be how banal all of the home video footage really is – adults and kids alike clowning around in dated ‘90s-era fashion at holiday parties and backyard barbeques. But with so much evil occurring just outside the edges of the frame, it makes you wonder how many other apparently happy family home videos are really just thin illusions covering up various transgressions. As it states in the end credits coda, 90% of child victims know their abuser. For anyone who holds dear the idea that family is sacred, Rewind feels like a punch in the gut.

Rewind airs May 11 as part of Independent Lens on PBS. It is currently also available on VOD.

  • Release Date: 5/8/2020
This post was written by
After his childhood dream of playing for the Mighty Ducks fell through, Mark turned his focus to the glitz and glamour of the movies. He's covered the extensive Toronto film scene for online outlets and is a filmmaker himself, currently putting the final touches on a low-budget (okay, no-budget) short film to be released in the near future. You can also find him behind the counter as product manager of Toronto's venerable film institution, Bay Street Video.
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