SXSW Review: ONE MINUTE TO NINE

Within a few minutes of watching One Minute to Nine, we learn that an ordinary-looking wife and mother of four will be heading to prison in a few days. It doesn't take long to surmise that she might have been the victim of long-term domestic violence: just the way her young teenage sons and various female family members gingerly move around her and the interior of their modest home sets off alarms, as does the absence of any kind of father figure.

Right at this point, I became impatient and irritated. I wanted the facts of the case to be laid out, a timetable established, family members, relationships, and ages identified, and so forth. But I'm grateful that filmmaker Tommy Davis tells the story of Wendy Maldonado and her family in the sometimes elliptical manner that he does, because it allows us to hear about Wendy's life in her own words.

As the tale unfolds, it becomes an absorbing reflection on the hideous acts that unfolded behind closed doors in the Maldonado household, but it starts as a teenage love dream set against the wooded beauty of rural Grants Pass, Oregon, U.S.A.

Wendy and her husband met and married early; amateur home video footage reveals a playful teen couple happily expecting their first child. In the present day, Wendy recites their early history in a casual, soft-spoken way, almost off-handedly mentioning that their daughter died from illness after just nine days. As if that tragedy were not enough, Wendy says that within a year of their marriage she discovered she had married a man who declared his ambition to become a serial killer. Not just any kind of serial killer, though: one who would first torture and skin his victims.

You wonder why, at that point, Wendy didn't simply run far away.

It sounds like a fair question to someone who has not experienced such things, but director Davis was clearly not looking to make a comprehensive documentary on the subject of domestic violence. We don't hear from any outside experts, we don't hear from doctors or lawyers or police officers or journalists. Outside the Maldonado family, we only hear from a few people who were eyewitnesses of the domestic abuse and who all called the police to report what they saw.

Oh, and we hear an extended, devastating excerpt from an emergency phone call by Wendy to 9-1-1.

One Minute to Nine remains tightly focused on Wendy and her family, and it's that narrow scope that increases the power of the film. Whether you agree with her actions or not, you feel as though you're standing nearby -- maybe even in her cowering shadow -- as she experiences abuse after abuse, and as she watches her husband rain down similar abuse upon her young children. The days pass too quickly until she must report to prison.

Sad to say, it's not an unfamiliar story -- though the cruelty of the husband and father's viciousness is bracing -- yet I found myself completely enveloped in this family tragedy.

Wendy Maldonado is a heartbreaking figure, unable to fully understand her husband and why he acted the way he did, and equally unable to come to grips with her inability to break free from his iron grasp. What she does know is that she loves her children, and they love her and each other, and that no one should have to suffer such pain.

Once Minute to Nine has its North American Premiere at SXSW next Monday, March 10, and also screens on Wednesday, March 12 and Saturday, March 15.