A stirring autobiographical examination of the long shadows of familial neglect and violence, director Gian Cassini’s Comala uses the 2010 murder of his estranged father to explore trauma left undiscussed and truths left unsaid. A world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, the movie deftly sidesteps any type of pat true crime framing of its details, slowly developing into something much more delicate, ruminative, and haunting.

After his parents separated when he was only one year old, Cassini grew up in Monterrey, Mexico, with his mother. He reconnected with his father — a loafer, scammer, small-time criminal, habitual womanizer, and eventual hitman known as El Jimmy — when he was 14 years old and had intermittent contact with him for several years. Cassini would become an eager mentor figure to his half-brother Anthony before drifting away from his father and this side of his family, triggered by a dark event that colors what he says is the “truth he knows in his heart” about El Jimmy’s actions.

Despite the potential salaciousness of its subject matter, Cassini scrupulously avoids turning his movie into a Deadline-style investigation of either his father’s murder or even his sordid, semi-secret life. Working together with co-editors Elva Guzmán and Ana Laura Zerón, Cassini peels back layers of family history and secrets like an onion. This starts with his mother Eloisa, who refuses to believe stories about El Jimmy’s criminal ways, and his uncle Dakar, who served time in prison on drug charges. Later, Cassini reconnects Stateside with his half-sister Nenette, his sister-in-law Saira, and young nieces and nephews. In its final third, the movie winds back even further, locating Cassini’s grandfather Gustavo, who left his grandmother Mavis many years ago.

As Cassini navigates this nest of broken relationships and somewhat unreliable narrators, each driven by their own unique blend of denial and subconscious motivations, there are some shocking and unsettling revelations about who knew what and when regarding El Jimmy’s actions (“Everyone is free to choose how to make a living — work is work,” says one family member). Comala resists the posture of deeply felt, if ultimately empty, outrage. Instead, it applies a mournful lens to these moments of moral decay, implicitly showing their connection to cycles of abandonment, poor decision-making, and toxic masculinity.

This type of genealogical collage study was somewhat pioneered by Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, which remains an influential landmark in low-budget self-portraiture. While Comala doesn’t exhibit quite the same exacting, textured level of archival overlay as that film, it still makes very effective use of a lot of old family photos and home videos. It does so in an occasionally cinematic way, too, with one evocative segment showing Cassini scrolling through photos which are then projected back onto his face.

If it could benefit from a slightly more foregrounded family tree, to help guide a viewer along, Comala also threads a fine needle in telling this story about one family while also crafting a broader inquisition of internalized misogyny and other interpersonal and societal ills. Cassini, who remains a fairly stolid figure throughout, exhibits a fine, intuitive understanding of how and when to more forthrightly incorporate or state his own feelings, and when to remain silent. Much to his credit, he doesn’t force himself into being the “star” of the film, or showily announce every emotion. In fact, there’s a bit of a jolt when one realizes, late in the movie, that he’s used photos to revisit the crime scene of one of his father’s victims.

In the end, even though it isn’t at all a whodunit, Comala lands, naturally and unclamorously, on a figure and element of complicity in El Jimmy’s death. And the manner in which Cassini handles this moment imbues his film with a touching sense of grace. Early and/or unintended pregnancies, a lack of economic and educational opportunities, and dozens of other factors feed the flight instinct of especially immature young males. A well-crafted, dirgeful nonfiction work, Comala uses one extended family’s story to show the interconnectedness of these issues and ponder the tough question of whether and how those damaging cycles can be broken.