It feels odd to describe a near-DIY documentary about the shifting familial values and lingering personal demons of Middle America as nothing more than an unequivocal visual triumph, but there’s a distinctively, and hauntingly, dehumanizing quality about the graphic approach of October Country. Essentially a video collaboration between photographer Donal Mosher and director Michael Palmieri documenting one eventfully pensive year among the former’s parents and siblings, the film organizes intimate interviews, baroquely autumnal landscapes, and still-life shots of domestic bibelots into a narrative that follows the tortured arhythms of the Mosher clan with artful grace. The result is undeniably a beautiful object, but it is an object: Embracing the visual serenity requires a challenging emotional cost that might be the film’s most intriguing aspect.

It’s not quite that the cozily bombinating fluorescence of the dim interiors or the stale, burnt, leafy look of the plein air footage disrespects the down-home speech that forms the movie’s jagged story; one scene, in fact, quite incisively juxtaposes the glittering, pyro-patriotic carnage of fireworks against a pained monologue from the introspective patriarch Don about serving in the thick of Vietnam and feeling wholly disassociated from homeland pride. But even here, cursorily correlating controlled, recreational violence and institutionalized, political violence, the filmmakers seem uninterested in teasing out subtle irony from their metaphors, content instead to let their lens glaze over in the presence of majesty-dripping imagery.