Mark Reviews Movies: WHAT HAUNTS US

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Capsule review by Mark Dujsik | May 10, 2018

Director Paige Tolmach's documentary What Haunts Us begins as a mystery, but it quickly and wisely dispels itself of that conceit. This story is too important to play any sort of game with it.

It's a personal story, too. Tolmach, a first-time filmmaker, is an alumnus of an elite high school in Charleston, South Carolina. Over the years, she and her fellow classmates noticed an alarming trend: A handful of men who had attended the school at the same time as the director were committing suicide. Almost two decades later, the news came out: One of the teachers at the school had been molesting male students.

The film serves as an investigation into the teacher, his crimes, and the wicked cover-up that allowed him to abuse and rape boys as young as 12 years old—not just at Porter-Gaud but for the entirety of his 40-year teaching career. That story is infuriating enough, but Tolmach has an even more vital purpose here: to give voice to the survivors and to place the blame, not only directly where it belongs, but also to the indirect ways that ordinary people allow such crimes to occur.

It's not condemnation from a pedestal, though. Tolmach implicates herself in that culture of silence, having heard a story from one of the teacher's victims and saying nothing. The ways in which the teacher groomed his victims was not just well-known to other students, members of the school's faculty and administration, and the local community. It became fodder for jokes.

That the documentary comes from a place of great pain and shame is undeniable, and that pain is the film's driving force. Tolmach juxtaposes video depositions from survivors at the time of the teacher's arrest with present-day interviews. It's a subtle maneuver but one that's quite effective. The stories being told 20 years apart are equally descriptive. Such things—these memories, this pain, the combination of embarrassment and guilt and uncertainty—do not go away.

It's a short film, and Tolmach wastes no time with it. What Haunts Us is the story of a series of crimes, the conspiracy to hide them, and an indictment of a culture of silence that too often surrounds such despicable acts. This specific story may be old news, but here, it's presented with a sense of urgency that reminds us such stories never truly end.

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