Troubled families are all over the modern documentary scene. There is a particular affection for those filmmakers who can rustle up skeletons from the closet to then present to the world via a scrim of home-movie footage and mordant narration. The small unit of relations on the other end of Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's lens in October Country aren't that kind of family. Many of their problems are simply there, writ large on the surface and discussed in detail for all who will listen, or pay to see. The Moshers live in the Mohawk valley of upstate New York. Their town is a struggling-by kind place where those who can work in the Remington arms factory and everybody else just tries to survive. The children once worked, went off to war, or married those who did. Now they stay home and self-destruct, as the last couple generations of Moshers have. Dottie, the grandmother, is a commonsensical woman with a cigarette permanently affixed to her mouth, and a soft spot for people in trouble, whether her kids or not. (Bringing almost more heartache than her kids is Chris, their foster child with a knack for criminality.) While Dottie oversees the family's imploded tangle of hurt, her husband, Don, looks on from the sidelines, smoking. A veteran of three wars and long years in the local police department (thus the sawed-off mustache and gimlet eye for trouble), Don is bottled up with battlefield nightmares, an emotional dead-end. He's at once ghostly, a quiet and fictive figure in a verbose clan, and the one most present and aware. The family tree runs into further trouble with their daughter, Donna, who married an abuser, and appears to have bequeathed that disturbing legacy to her children. Daneal, vacant-seeming, with the wearied and deadened eyes of her grandfather, isn't even twenty and already has her own daughter, Ruby, fathered by another abuser now out of the picture. Then there's the apple-cheeked fireplug of trouble, Desi, not even ten but deploying the full assaulting, sarcastic weaponry of a kid five years older. A lone offshoot is Don's sister, a heavy-set, self-proclaimed witch and (possibly self-diagnosed) sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis who prefers skulking about in graveyards, trying to talk to ghosts, to communicating with her family. A different editing scheme would have made her easily satirized lifestyle an outlet for some well-deserved comic relief, but as it is, Don is the only one who gets a crack in at her (annoyed at her supposed disability, he wonders why she doesn't do something with her life. "So she's a witch. Open a witch store or something"). Like a short stack of family photos crisply flicked across a battered kitchen table, Palmieri and Mosher's film is a skein of sharp vignettes, their dark truths harshly limned. That's because everyone in the film knows the truth, and seems willing to speak. Maybe this openness is due to a family member being behind the camera (co-director Donal has previously explored his kin in essays and photo exhibits). Or maybe it's because they're all just sick of it, of the patterns repeating. The film has a haunted, autumnal motif, running loosely from one October to the next. It dips in and out of the running family saga (custody of Ruby, Daneal's new boyfriend), culminating with a stilted Halloween party where the ghosts and silence hang thick in the air as the cigarette smoke. While draping their film in spectral effects, dead leaves rustling down a quiet street or a trawl through a strobe-lit haunted house (many of these night-shot scenes harsh with blown-out whites, like flashes from a camera taking surprise snapshots), Palmieri and Mosher never let it turn camp. The gothic nature of all this generational sadness and failure only heightens the empathic mood of understanding, in the way that only a family member could truly accomplish.