Running Stumbled review

Director John Maringouin’s unsettling doc lays bare the dysfunctional relationship between his father Johnny Roe Jnr (whom he hasn’t seen in three decades) and his stepmother Virgie Marie Pennoui. The filmmaker thrusts us into the nightmare of day-to-day life at the couple’s junk-strewn New Orleans home. A onetime Cubist painter and ex-pimp now hooked on painkillers, Johnny showers verbal scorn on his equally foul-gobbed partner, who’s battling cancer. Digitally shot over 10 days, this stylised film raises ethical posers about the complicity of its disturbed participants. Still, there’s a visceral charge that’s impossible to ignore.