Tarnation
- heavy
- brisk
- intense
- surreal
- signature
- intimate
Heavy, kinetic, measured personal / essay, surreal in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette's documentary on growing up with his schizophrenic mother -- a mixture of snapshots, Super-8, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, and more -- culled from 19 years of his life.
Our read · Tarnation (2003) reads as a heavy, kinetic, surreal personal · essay · family entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook, with a strong directorial signature. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of Tarnation
What watching it is actually like.
“You want raw home-movie collage about a mother lost to madness.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if fragmented trauma archives feel too private tonight.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself