ANONYMOUS SISTER - Mark Reviews Movies

Anonymous Sister, Long Shot Factory

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | June 1, 2023

Director Jamie Boyle reveals the causes and consequences of the opioid crisis in the United States by way of her family in Anonymous Sister. This documentary, primarily assembled from home videos and intimate interviews with the director's immediate relatives, uncovers more than just one family's struggles with addiction, though. Having seen it firsthand, Boyle knows this personal story is just one of millions that could be told, and the openness, frankness, and compassion of this film could inspire more people to honesty, empathy, and action.

Boyle grew up in Colorado, taking up the family's video camera early in life. Meanwhile, her two-year-older sister Jordan became obsessed with ice skating as a child and, after finding a lot of success in youth competitions, was on a path toward the Olympics. Pushing herself because she was aware of the sacrifices her parents had to make for her dreams, Jordan eventually developed deep nerve damage in her feet, ending that potential career and resulting in doctors prescribing her pain medications of increasing potency.

This part of the story unfolds by way of those home videos—recorded by Boyle herself, her father, or her mother—and contemporary interviews, and it all seems so ordinary. As soon as it becomes clear that Jordan's health issues—not because of the pain but on account of the "cure"—are about to overtake her life, the filmmaker rewinds the entire story in order to put it within a broader context.

This is not simply the tale of the Boyle family, after all. The director enlists an expert on the addictive nature of pharmaceutical opioids, as well as an insider who was served as a sales representative for one of the companies that manufactures such medication, to explain how, as two of the Boyles started moving toward a lengthy struggle with addiction, the entire medical field was reconfigured by pharmaceutical companies in order sell their addictive, deadly product. The specific details, from a pain chart that we all take for granted now being part of what's essentially a propaganda effort to the financial incentives that perpetuated this crisis, are infuriating.

The director fills this narrative with a lot of information, yet it never loses sight of her family's own story. The mother, suffering from chronic pain herself, starts taking prescribed opioids, too, and feels compelled to continue in order to support her older daughter in her own struggles with addiction. It's a terrifying cycle, with the consolation being that we know how the family's story will end, because they're fortunate enough to be telling it in front of the camera.

Others aren't, of course, and while Anonymous Sister might not be structured in such a way to really expand its study to the whole of the crisis, Boyle ensures that we have some sense of the long, fatal scope of this human-made and greed-maintained epidemic. The stories are countless, but here is one to make us consider the rest.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products