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Wisconsin Death Trip

1999, Drama, 1h 16m

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Wisconsin death trip   photos.

The late 19th century finds the town of Black River Falls experiencing a wave of disturbing, macabre and truly eccentric occurrences. Perhaps the town's economic troubles or the harsh Wisconsin climate contribute to the plague of murder, arson, insanity, disease, suicide and other ills the cursed citizens endure. Part archival investigation, part dramatization, this film resurrects the demons of Black River Falls through bleak photographs and re-enactments of the town's sordid news articles.

Genre: Drama

Original Language: English

Director: James Marsh

Producer: Maureen A. Ryan , James Marsh

Writer: James Marsh

Release Date (Theaters): Sep 14, 2001  limited

Release Date (DVD): Feb 24, 2004

Runtime: 1h 16m

Distributor: Columbia Pictures

Production Co: Columbia

Cast & Crew

Jo Vukelich

Mary Sweeney

Jeffrey Golden

Marilyn White

Pauline L'Allemand

John Schneider

Asylum Clerk , Whispering Voice

James Marsh

Anthony Wall

Executive Producer

Sheila Nevins

Carol Hirschi

Nancy Abraham

Maureen A. Ryan

Critic Reviews for Wisconsin Death Trip

Audience reviews for wisconsin death trip.

Murder, suicide, disease, insanity, and a shitload of broken windows. That seals it, I'm moving to Black River Falls. This was a fantastic documentary(?) based on the book of the same name which tells the true story of a small town in the late 1800s and early 1900s which descends into insanity. The story is so crazy it's hard to believe that it's true. Actually, if you take a look at the fucked up world around us I guess it may be harder to believe that it doesn't happen more often.

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Wisconsin death trip.

1999 Directed by James Marsh

Inspired by the book of the same name, film-maker James Marsh relays a tale of tragedy, murder and mayhem that erupted behind the respectable facade Black River Falls, Wisconsin in the 19th century.

Ian Holm Marcus Monroe Marilyn White John Baltes Molly Nikki Anderson Brittany Haydock Eddie Kunz Steven Strobel

Director Director

James Marsh

Producers Producers

James Marsh Maureen A. Ryan

Writer Writer

Original writer original writer.

Michael Lesy

Editor Editor

Jinx Godfrey

Cinematography Cinematography

Eigil Bryld

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Anthony Wall

Additional Photography Add. Photography

Frankie DeMarco

Composers Composers

John Cale DJ Shadow

Costume Design Costume Design

Ellen Kozak

BBC BBC Arena Hands On Cinemax

Documentary Crime

Intense violence and sexual transgression Challenging or sexual themes & twists Show All…

Releases by Date

05 sep 1999, 02 jul 2000, releases by country.

• Theatrical NR

76 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by laird ★★★★ 1

Old, Weird America

Mary Sweeney , the schoolteacher who became a serial window-smasher/coke-addict, is my new favorite folk hero.

Review by mrbalihai ★★★★ 6

Film 1 of my Behind the Cheddar Curtain Film Festival .

If you've ever paged through a copy of Michael Lesy's 1973 book, with its melancholy daguerreotypes of child corpse photos, stoic immigrant farmers, and newspaper clippings describing the bizarre, disturbing, and murderous activities that took place in and around the small town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin at the turn of the century, then you can probably imagine how difficult it would be to turn it into a documentary that wouldn't have viewers running for the exits in terror or putting a gun in their mouths.

Fortunately, director James Marsh figured out how to translate the book's exceedingly weird cabin-fever dream into an intimate, oddly beautiful, and heartfelt examination…

Review by Evan “Kaizō Haya-shill” Pincus ★★★★★ 1

Northern gothic. One of those movies that should be FAR wider known- it's an odd little docudrama from a director who went on to win Oscars, which means it's at least got a somewhat big name behind the camera, and the mood here is so incredibly thick, full of violence, death, and absurdity that it's shocking this isn't a popular cult classic. Needs a blu-ray stat, and a release of the absolutely incredible soundtrack wouldn't hurt either.

Review by Niall Urquhart ★★★½ 1

This was surprisingly enjoyable. It felt more like an essay film than a documentary. It mostly consisted of Ian Holm reading out newspaper reports of grisly goings-on in 1890s Wisconsin. Most involved people with mental health issues, many of whom were immigrants. There were recurring characters like the woman addicted to cocaine who loved breaking windows. There were also 1890s photos plus reconstructions of some events. The footage from modern day America wasn't needed though.

Review by s. mill ★★★★½ 3

life is temporary, death is forever, and photography cannot save us. folk murder ballad cinema. one of the most essential midwest movies i’ve ever seen. it is rather slight and still and quiet and certainly not for everybody, but it’s sorta made for me.

Review by Split Tooth

The beauty of 'Wisconsin Death Trip' is its balance of lurid imagery and numbing monotony. Any piece worth its salt on James Marsh’s film is sure to include a depressing list of everyday horrors: dead and abandoned children, pestilence, suicide, murder, starvation, poverty, famine, despair, economic collapse, arson, addiction, witchcraft and satanic rituals, drunk bees, blind rage, rampant gun violence, self-immolation. The list goes on, all tied to events that occurred over a 10-year period, the last decade of the 19th century, in the greater Black River Falls, Wisconsin, area.

The volume and intensity of the events depicted in the film has a cumulative effect, and the matter-of-fact, adjective-free recitation of each tale makes the aberrant feel ordinary, even expected…

Review by Matt Lavender ★★★½

An account of some fucked up shit that happened in Black River Falls, Wisconsin between 1890 and 1900. Uses newspaper articles and black and white photos from the time with some black and white shot recreated scenes so it's not just a slideshow. Here's some shit from the first 15 minutes: Suicide by dynamite, a serial window smasher, kids murdering siblings, people losing their minds, creeping depression, a spreading diphtheria epidemic, burning houses and dead children. A tour de force of misery and suffering. Changes it's style up a bit after the relentless opening, goes to the present day (or sometime in the 90s at least) and a quick hello from the Mayor. Then it's back to the black and…

Review by Klon ★★★★★

Each sentence of narration could be the subject of its own Nick Cave song, but Mary Sweeney, the coked up teacher that gets her jollies breaking windows, is the breakaway star of this movie.

Review by The Professor ★★★½ 1

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

I watched this movie back in September of last year, and it's just been sitting here, waiting for someone to request it. It had been so long, that I had to do a rewatch, and, further research (including acquiring the original 1973 Michael Lesy book [no easy task] and absorbing it completely).

And this is what I have to say about Wisconsin Death Trip .

It's a perfectly creepy adaptation of a perfectly unfilmable book.

The book itself is a masterpiece, plain and simple. Just news clippings, random quotations and photographs from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, taken from the years 1895-1910. Apparently, life was pretty hard back then.

You would think that this would be something that would be completely…

Review by Lochlan Ashton ★★★

I wasn’t planning on watching this but my uncle stuck it on i. The caravan and I ended up enjoying it. It’s something different for a documentary. It was really enjoyable but also scary at the same time.

Review by Evan “Kaizō Haya-shill” Pincus ★★★★★

Murder. Suicide. Disease. Crime. Welcome to Wisconsin heading into the turn of the 20th century, a place where bad news is plentiful and every change in weather just heralds a slightly different case of seasonal depression. Director James Marsh (Man on Wire, The Theory of Everything) recreates selected headlines from the era in beautifully staged reenactments. This has gotta have one of the best compiled soundtracks of all time.

Review by cameron fetter ★★★★ 2

really worth watching

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Cast of Wisconsin Death Trip

About wisconsin death trip, full cast of wisconsin death trip, ian holm plays narrator (voice), about ian holm.

Sir Ian Holm Cuthbert CBE (12 September 1931 – 19 June 2020) was an English actor. After beginning his career on the ...

Marcus Monroe plays Young Anderson

Marilyn white plays pauline l'allemand, john baltes plays undertaker, molly nikki anderson plays mrs. larson, brittany haydock plays baptized girl, eddie kunz plays abandoned boy, steven strobel plays union man, crew of wisconsin death trip, john cale music, james marsh director, james marsh producer, maureen a. ryan producer, james marsh writer, richard sattin thanks, phil bricklebank colorist.

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Movie's ratings

• Kinorium 6.7 100+
• IMDb 6.6 1604
• Critics 75% 24

Cast & Crew

• Technical Data

Wisconsin Death Trip — Cast & Crew

Sound director, james marsh.

Jeffrey Golden

Jo vukelich, marcus monroe, marilyn white, john schneider, john baltes, raeleen mcmillion, krista grambow, bobbie jo westphal, scott hulbert, kathryn anderson, kevin anderson, liam anderson, molly nikki anderson.

Nathan Butchart

Colin cameron, angel hamilton, brittany haydock.

Marc Jacobs

Dana Joseph

Joshua kapp.

Cody Marenes

Tyler marenes, tess miller, braden moran.

Michael Olson

Emily roske, clayton simchick, debbi sommi, jeana stillman, steven strobel.

M. Scott Taulman

Michael Lesy

Nancy abraham.

Maureen A. Ryan

Carol hirschi, sheila nevins.

Anthony Wall

Eigil bryld.

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Produced by, wisconsin death trip (1999), directed by james marsh.

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Wisconsin Death Trip (1999)

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Wisconsin Death Trip

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Brief Synopsis

Cast & crew, james marsh, jo vukelich, marilyn white, jeffrey golden, marcus monroe, john schneider, technical specs.

Using archival photos, newspaper stories, and hospital records to recreate life in 1890s Black River Falls, Wisconsin-- a Protestant community of merchants, farmers, most of them recent German and Scandinavian immigrants. The multiple cases of murder, madness and mayhem make today's tabloid headlines seem tame by comparison. (Having Mendota Asylum for the Insane nearby certainly helps.) The area is plagued by ghost-sightings, bizarre suicides, teenage outlaws--and a cocaine-crazed school mistress with a compulsion to smash windows. 'Little House on the Prairie' will never look the same.

Nancy Abraham

Eigil bryld, jinx godfrey, carol hirschi, ellen kozak, michael lesy, sheila nevins, christopher russo, maureen a ryan, anthony wall.

Miscellaneous Notes

Released in United States 1999

Released in United States 2011

Released in United States July 2000

Released in United States September 13, 2001

Released in United States September 1999

Released in United States Winter December 1, 1999

Shown at Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival October 20 - November 15, 1999.

Shown at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival July 5-15, 2000.

Shown at Telluride Film Festival September 3-6, 1999.

Broadcast in USA over Cinemax July 24, 2000.

Released in United States 1999 (Shown at Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival October 20 - November 15, 1999.)

Released in United States 2011 (Ripping Reality)

Released in United States July 2000 (Shown at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival July 5-15, 2000.)

Released in United States September 1999 (Shown at Telluride Film Festival September 3-6, 1999.)

Released in United States September 13, 2001 (Shown in Los Angeles (American Cinematheque) as part of series "The Alternative Screen: A Forum For Independent Film Exhibition and Beyond..." September 13, 2001.)

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November 28, 1999 `Wisconsin Death Trip': A Record of Despair Born of a Single Image Related Articles The New York Times on the Web: Current Film Forum Join a Discussion on Current Film By GREIL MARCUS HEN I first heard that someone had made a movie out of Michael Lesy's shocking, genre-defying "Wisconsin Death Trip," I couldn't imagine the result, or think of a book less amenable to film. It seemed absolutely a thing in itself: its own construct, its own nightmare, its own scream. Seph J. Pennell Collection/University of Kansas Library The Breen family in 1905, from James Marsh's film ``Wisconsin Death Trip.'' The film's director, James Marsh, of Arena, an adventurous division of the British Broadcasting Corporation, found Lesy's legendary 1973 title in a New York used-book store. "I made the book," Lesy says. "The book found James." The mystical language is appropriate; the book can cast a spell. It is a progressively horrifying portrait of one small town, Black River Falls, Wis., crumbling -- socially, morally, psychologically, physically -- under the impact of the great depression of the 1890's. The words "great depression" do not take capitals here, as with the Great Depression of the 1930's; unlike that calamity, the depression of a century ago did not enter American folklore. This collapse of the American economy was denied even as it happened: the 1893 Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, which introduced the Ferris wheel to the United States, was the denial as theme park. The depression hit farm states the hardest. There, where the weather had been understood as the greatest threat to an orderly life, all other foundations of predictability -- the assumption that in domestic and working life one day would be much like the one before it -- were destroyed. The films Marsh made before "Wisconsin Death Trip" are imaginative, playful and well-defined; they hardly seem preparation for anything so dark and potentially borderless and out of control as his latest, which opens at the Film Forum in Manhattan on Wednesday. Marsh received his first directorial assignment in 1989, when he was 25. Arena, says Marsh -- an Englishman now living in New York -- was putting on "themed evenings, four or five hours a night on a single subject." One was "Food night," and for it Marsh conceived a 15-minute segment on the last meals of condemned prisoners. "I wanted to know what the ritual meant in a bureaucratic system of execution," he says, recalling that in the British tradition a prisoner's last meal might also have involved a last drunk, complete with prostitutes. Because capital punishment had been all but abolished in the United Kingdom since the 1960's, Marsh set off for a two-day shoot on Death Row in Louisiana. "I wanted to expose the process in one detail," he says. He ended up focusing on a single prisoner, a man "outraged by the crazy idea of hospitality at the end of his life." There is probably a more direct line from this first project to Marsh's "Wisconsin Death Trip" than to another food piece by him, "The Burger and the King." In this graceful account of "The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley," the fine David Adler book on which the film is based, cooks from throughout Presley's life -- from his high school cafeteria, the Army, Graceland -- present their dishes proudly and so lovingly that by the end one may want nothing more than to copy down the recipe for fried banana and peanut-butter sandwiches and make one. "I became increasingly aware of the power of a single image, especially in photography: Diane Arbus, W. Eugene Smith," Marsh says when asked about the inspirations behind his films. That inspiration is most visible in Arena's revelatory 1993 series, "Story of a Song," Marsh's expansive accounts of Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue" and, especially, Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited." There Marsh offered not so much a story of a song as its biography -- as if it were a person, with ancestors and descendants. Watching the film, you can follow U.S. Highway 61 from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico as the Dylan song carries with it not only Highway 61 blues numbers but also the death of Bessie Smith, on Highway 61; Presley's childhood years in public housing, on Highway 61, and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Highway 61. The single image that seals the film, though, is a a dramatization of a young Bob Dylan leaving Minnesota for New York City in 1961. Running through the shot is an early, hesitant version of his epochal "Like a Rolling Stone." Then the soundtrack moves into the triumphant performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" from the 1965 LP that made Dylan a world figure: "Highway 61 Revisited," the album named for the song, which speaks for the United States itself. Highway 61 traces the spine of the nation, but by this point in the film you're ready to acknowledge every American road as Highway 61. You've also seen blues singers who have never heard of Bob Dylan singing their Highway 61 songs. You've heard homemade 1950's tapes of Dylan as a teenage Bobby Zimmerman singing his own composition "Little Richard" and then scorning Presley, Johnny Cash and Ricky Nelson for their thefts and failings. But all of that is now subsumed into the looming night lights of Manhattan. "In a film you can create a whole complex of emotions, a situation, in a single image," Marsh says. "For 'Wisconsin Death Trip' I was already informed as to the power of the single image: looking at the book and the ghosts staring back at me." Eigil Byrld Angel Hamilton as homesick Anna Myenek, who burned down her employer's barn and house. Michael Lesy's book, a new edition of which will be published in February by the University of New Mexico Press, was born 30 years ago when Lesy, then a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, found an archive of 3,000 images left by one Charles Van Schaick, the town photographer of Black River Falls. In Van Schaick's time, ordinary people did not have cameras, difficult contraptions that involved black powder and heavy glass plates; to record the passages of a life -- births, marriages, store openings, funerals -- they turned to a professional. Lesy noticed Van Schaick's many pictures of dead infants and children, dressed in their christening gowns, now placed in tiny coffins. As he looked for the story behind these photos, he found a tale of plagues: of murder, suicide, farm and business failures, madness, addiction, tramp armies, and the ruin of childhood and the desolation of families by epidemics of diptheria, typhoid, smallpox and flu. Lesy made a montage, using items from the local paper, contemporaneous regional fiction and poetry, asylum records and the photographs left by Van Schaick, who in Lesy's pages emerges as Arbus's unknown ancestor. In words, the story was almost too much to take in, the accumulation of awful facts nearly mute in their cacophony. But the pictures spoke. From Van Schaick's archive Lesy made a tableau of disassociation, terror and insanity passing for everyday life. It was all in the blank eyes, the frozen mouths in family portraits: those were the ghosts James Marsh saw. Marsh's "Wisconsin Death Trip" is less a film of Lesy's book than a quiet reinhabiting of the world it found, or made. "In a way the book is unfilmable," says Marsh. So he left the book. For the movie, he alternates long black-and-white segments set a century ago -- through prairie-flat re-enactments, you see an 1890's avatar of Susan Smith sitting by the lake where she has drowned her children, a farmer randomly killed by a young boy, farmers who have killed themselves, two women murdered by a tramp they have fed and then the tramp's own suicide, a madwoman traveling the county in search of windows to break, and, in parlor scenes, just how dead children were positioned to have their pictures taken -- with brief, prosaic interludes of present-day Black River Falls shot in color. "What today speaks for the town," says Marsh, "what binds it, what is undermining it." "What I did get from the book," Marsh says, "was the rhythm: the emerging incremental idea. But in terms of the stories themselves, the starting point was definitely photographic. Start with an image, a single image, and then move -- a lot of long tracking shots, to keep a sense of the still image moving. But I knew I couldn't film it. Do I try to contextualize the story, or do I let the stories yield their own mysteries -- or do I have someone sitting in a chair, explaining? That was the first choice I made, not to try and explain the social-political-cultural history of anything. The stories are based on a respect for these individual tragedies and disasters. If the film lacks one thing, it's a governing idea on that level -- but it would have been a travesty." What one takes away from Lesy's book are faces. In the film, it's a series of incidents that hangs in the memory like half-remembered dreams: true, undeniable, but unbidden and incomplete. The actors seem both physically present and psychologically anonymous. Often you don't register their faces at all; they could be anyone. "A lot of the casting had to do with financial constraints," Marsh says. He worked first with a limited "documentary budget" from Arena, then with money he made from projects he took on mainly to pay for "Death Trip." Finally, after rejections from European companies on the ground that the project was, in Marsh's words, "morbid, distasteful and obsessed with the wrong aspects of human life" and after no response at all from the PBS series "The American Experience," he was rescued by a co-sponsorship from HBO's Cinemax division, which paid for a 35-millimeter print. "We had open casting calls in Madison and Milwaukee: old thesps from the local theater, lots of people with interesting faces who hadn't acted," Marsh says. "A lot of the acting was improvised or: 'Do nothing.' 'Stand.' " The re-enactments were shot at 30 frames a second, he says, to get "a barely perceptible slow-motion effect: that disconcerting stillness in the scenes." The actors, he adds, "can't hit marks; they don't know the grammar. "But most of it wasn't acting; it's like striking poses." This is the source of the bluntness of the violence that is shown, which in Marsh's film is far more stark, and seemingly unmediated, than the stylized violence that movies conventionally offer. The ordinariness of the postures and gestures of the actors puts the viewer in their shoes. You can feel the rope pulling at your throat as a farmer dangles from a tree, go suddenly cold as another lies down in the snow across the railroad tracks, flinch and want to run as a man chases, shoots and kills the woman who will not marry him. You can even feel the deadened peace of the mother at the lake. The instruction to do nothing, to just stand, also creates the single image, and the single face, that most people will very likely take away from "Wisconsin Death Trip": that of Jo Vukelich as Mary Sweeney, the window smasher. As the film follows her from town to town, as she picks her targets -- with care, apparently, as if in an effort to make meaning, to send a message, to lodge some sort of protest -- you see glass shattering, then a strongly built woman staring straight at those of her fellows who are merely watching her, or those who have come to take her away. Her fearsomely unreadable countenance seems to be insisting that by her actions she has said all that need be said, that through her destructions she is writing the book of her place and time. Only at the end of the movie is any explanation offered, but it's hardly needed. "I am mad but not without my reasons," she seems to say with the turn of her body and the dull gleam in her eyes. "And if you had my courage you would know my reasons are yours." One "veers and turns," Howie Movshovitz wrote in The Los Angeles Times after seeing the premiere of "Wisconsin Death Trip" at the Telluride Film Festival in September, "trying to avoid the possibility that the history of Black River Falls is not unlike the present all over the country." All that allows you to avoid that conclusion, though, is the sense of insulation, of a world in suspension, that one gets from watching a movie. The day the film was shown at Telluride, in Colorado, the headline in The Denver Post was generic for the reader, singular only for the people in it: "Gunman kills wife, two others at grocery store -- Grand Junction woman had just served divorce papers on husband." As a historian, Lesy is a dramatist. Perhaps for that reason, the events he recorded and the people who made them seem very far away. The people in Marsh's picture are all without affect, and they seem to claim the present as much as the past. The film realizes the ambitions of its small team (along with Marsh, the producer, Maureen Ryan; the director of photography, Eigil Bryld, and the editor, Jinx Godfrey): the wish, in Marsh's words, "to create rhythm, in the shooting and the editing, relentlessly putting together little fragments of stories, building to them and building away from them." What they got, though, was the illusion of a tale complete and whole, a distant story from a century ago that with the force of prophecy seems to rush forward, to our time and past it.   

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Watch Wisconsin Death Trip

• 1 hr 16 min
• 6.6   (1,597)

Wisconsin Death Trip is a dark and eerie documentary-drama hybrid film from 1999, based on Michael Lesy's 1973 book of the same name. Directed by James Marsh and narrated by Ian Holm, the movie explores a series of bizarre and tragic events that took place in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, during the late 19th century. Set in the 1890s, the film depicts life in this small Midwestern town as a bleak and hopeless affair. The residents of Black River Falls are plagued by a range of social, economic, and psychological problems, and their lives are marred by poverty, sickness, madness, and death. The film blends archival footage, reenactments, and contemporary interviews with haunting photographs from Lesy's book, creating a surreal and disturbing portrait of a community on the brink of collapse.

One of the central themes of the film is the pervasive sense of despair that grips Black River Falls. Against a backdrop of economic recession, rampant alcoholism, and social isolation, the residents of the town turn to various forms of escapism and self-destruction. Some indulge in opium use or prostitution, while others succumb to suicide or murder. The film traces the fates of several individuals who become caught up in this cycle of misery and violence, including a farmer who murders his wife and children, a young woman who is driven to insanity by the death of her child, and a group of children who engage in a spate of vandalism and arson.

Another key theme of the film is the role of the media in shaping public perceptions of these events. As the film progresses, we see how newspaper reports and photographs sensationalize and distort the tragedies of Black River Falls, turning them into macabre spectacles that both fascinate and horrify their readers. The film suggests that this process of media manipulation and spectacle is not just a historical curiosity, but an ongoing feature of contemporary society, as we continue to be captivated by stories of violence and tragedy.

Throughout the film, the visuals are striking and evocative, ranging from sepia-toned photographs of Victorian-era America to vivid reenactments of the town's most shocking moments. The film's score, composed by DJ Shadow, is equally haunting, blending atmospheric soundscapes with eerie spoken-word samples. Ian Holm's narration is also excellent, lending a tone of somber detachment to the proceedings.

Wisconsin Death Trip is not an easy film to watch, but it is a gripping and thought-provoking exploration of a forgotten corner of American history. By blending fact and fiction, the film creates a haunting portrait of a community on the brink of collapse, and raises important questions about the nature of human suffering, media manipulation, and the power of history to shape our understanding of the world around us. This is a film that lingers in the mind, haunting the viewer long after the credits have rolled.

• Genres Documentary Crime
• Cast Ian Holm Jeffrey Golden Jo Vukelich
• Director James Marsh
• Release Date 2000
• MPAA Rating NR
• Runtime 1 hr 16 min
• Language English
• IMDB Rating 6.6   (1,597)
• Metascore 40