by MATTHEW HAYS

Suffocating repression has long been a staple of the Canadian feature, or so my film profs used to tell me. And there's certainly a great deal of fodder to back up that theory, from the science-gone-horrifically-wrong, sex-meets-death sci-fi of Cronenberg to the deadly lust of Kissed.

With his adaptation of Barbara Gowdy's novel, filmmaker Scott Smith delves into the arena of family melodrama - the kind with a whack of repressed kids and two nutjob parents who serve as a constant reminder that therapy should be in everyone's future. Falling Angels, set in '69, has mom (played by Miranda Richardson) a tortured traumatized soul, so damaged by her past that she douses her barely-catatonic state with large doses of hard liquor. It doesn't seem to be helping.

It's certainly not helping the kids, who do their very best to navigate their way through school, desperate to look normal to the outside world while hell unfolds at home on a regular basis. Dad (Callum Keith Rennie, who's become a staple in this sub-genre of films) copes with mom's out of control state by being a complete and utter control freak, treating his family like they're a military platoon.

If it sounds unpleasant, it is. Smith (whose previous feature Rollercoaster rightly put him on the map as a force to behold) makes the intelligent move of never holding back, offering no forced and/or manipulatively mawkish moments. Sadly, these are the bits and pieces network TV rarely shows us, the hardship, horror and endurance test that some family life can amount to.

What Smith does, however, is to transcend simply telling a rough tale of a nutty family. He loads the film with pitch black comedy, giving it a rich texture that most filmmakers wouldn't be able to conjure up. Yes, Falling Angels is another Canadian movie about repressed people coping within a family that's wildly dysfunctional. But thanks to its rich source material, astute performances and keen direction, Smith's film manages to add up to much, much more.

Falling Angels opens Friday, March 12 at Cinéma du Parc

>> Movie Listings