Life With Murder

Life With Murder (Director: John Kastner): 20-year-old Mason Jenkins murdered his 18-year-old sister with mul­tiple shotgun blasts to the head on January 6, 1998. The crime occurred in the home he resided in with his only sib­ling and par­ents, in the small town of Chatham, Ontario, and Mason was con­victed of first-degree-murder after his shaky alibi was deemed not cred­ible. Mason main­tained his inno­cence until 2007, when he finally relented and provided a strange, irra­tional reason for having shot his sister, with whom he’d appar­ently always been close. Despite the hell their son put them through, the par­ents, Leslie and Brian, still choose to keep him in their lives, making reg­ular visits to Mason at Warkworth Institution, a medium-security cor­rec­tional facility.

Director/writer/producer John Kastner, a three-time Emmy winner, has a ver­it­able gold­mine of bizarre, intriguing details to work with in Life With Murder, with a fairly equal bal­ance given to both a dis­sec­tion of the crime, and its con­sequences and after­math. Neither side is easy to watch, espe­cially the latter. Kastner presents a thor­ough probing of the case, having gained access to police inter­rog­a­tion videos, the 911 call, crime scene doc­u­ment­a­tion, and inter­views with detect­ives from the case. The inter­rog­a­tion videos are quite fas­cin­ating to watch, but the inter­views with the grieving par­ents, some from just mere hours after the murder occurred, are dis­turbing and uncom­fort­able viewing. The fact that the mother her­self made repeated requests to the Chatham police to release the tapes for inclu­sion in the film doesn’t make the exper­i­ence of watching them feel any less invasive or wrong.

Credit Kastner with dig­ging deep to uncover pre­vi­ously unheard details about the case, including an explor­a­tion of Mason’s belated con­fes­sion, not to men­tion a blind­siding bomb­shell about the crime that ratchets up the creep factor by sev­eral notches. Despite the rich ingredi­ents with which it has to work, Kastner’s movie left me feeling unful­filled and empty, like it should have had much more of an impact. Leslie’s state­ment that “you don’t throw a kid away” and the uncon­di­tional love she and Brian have for Mason, even after what he did (and espe­cially after that bomb­shell, which I won’t spoil) just seem totally at odds with logic and reason, and only added to my frus­tra­tion with the movie. Another mys­tery: the par­ents never moved out of the home where the murder took place. The film also ends up playing as some­thing less cine­matic and more suited to tele­vi­sion, like an extended ver­sion of the CBC’s “The Fifth Estate” (which isn’t a knock on that pro­gram, as they do a lot of excel­lent work).

Official site of the film

(5/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs10, crime, family, murder