A documentary about the mysterious death of fringe political filmmaker David Crowley, who was found dead alongside members of his family in their suburban Minnesota home in January of 2015.
This well-crafted doc makes for an absorbingly bizarre footnote. One suspects we are living in a historical epoch that is going to provide many such footnotes for some time to come.
Engrossing for the reasons it's also unsatisfying: As Adam Shambour, a friend of Mr. Crowley's, says, it's a mystery that answers all the major questions except "Why?"
Clear enough about what happened to be ambiguous about what it means, the film makes only one clean argument: Truth isn't always stranger than fiction, but it's often a hell of a lot sadder.
Unfolding like a more intricately plotted installment of "48 Hours," Erik Nelson's "A Gray State" is a genuinely unsettling examination of a 2015 murder case.
