Beautiful shot, emotionally distant and utterly incoherent. What interested me in the film to begin with, the story of this small town and all of the bizarre misfortune it faced, turned out to not be true at all. But the film never freely admits this. The film moves between the B&W past and a living-color present. The present documents the town of Black River Falls exclusively, a small town in northern Wisconsin. So, when we flash back to the past, we are led to believe that all of the morbid events: murder, madness and mayhem, that we're hearing about occurred in or around Black River Falls. Perhaps some of it did occur in the immediate region, but more precisely, we're getting accounts of the morbid events from the Black River Falls NEWSPAPER. So we're talking about events all over the state, not in one small town! A girl drowned herself in the lake in Kenosha? Kenosha is near the Illinois border. Not to mention that other towns in the film: Appleton, Rhinelander, Eau Claire, LaCrosse, Beaver Dam, and Madison represent points at every corner of the state. Most people wouldn't realize this, but when you do, you know the rest of the film is based on a flimsy misrepresentation and it completely loses its coherence and what makes its initial premise compelling. If the timeframe were 10 years later, they might well have represented McKinley's assassination as taking place in Black River Falls, since the paper surely had a story about it. I didn't hate the film, it has some great imagery and some of the stories are interesting enough, but I felt cheated more than anything, because in the end, there's no real through-line and as such, not only no resolution but nothing to resolve.
Review of Wisconsin Death Trip
