The documentary Alma is an opus full of marvels, madness, and misery, in which Margie Thorpe, a young Southern woman, invites us into the hallucination-encrusted world of her mother, Alma. Through numerous spellbinding interviews, the film circumnavigates around phantasms of rhetoric and downright hysterical scenarios until it delicately exposes the hideous roots of Alma and Margie's peculiar relationship.

To enter this documentary is to descend into the maelstrom of Alma's existence. Margie, acting as our guide, leads us through the treacherous and vertiginous waters that surround her mother, and it soon becomes obvious that the brutal circumstances of Alma's youth led to the eventual capsizing of her mental vessel. Since that initial fissuring of her reality, Alma has come to inhabit an area that resembles, as far as I can tell, the Bermuda Triangle--a mental state where convoys sent from reality, as reality is known to most of us, disappear without explanation. Margie is the one viable link between the two worlds. And it seems that she has survived the perils of that place on the life preserver of her humor.

Not that Margie hasn't considered throwing off the yoke of her family members' misfortune before, but they inevitably wrangle her back into their lives to provide them with some kind of aid or companionship. After Alma murderously threatens her neighbor with a BB gun, it is Margie who escorts her mother (along with a talisman of frozen lamb) to the county courthouse.

The film wanders between patches of home movies, old correspondences, mildewing photographs, and present-day episodes, lingering at the piano now and again to listen to Alma as she sings us some malfunctioning and wild strains of harmony. And then the camera sometimes breaks free to explore the cadaverous moments of Alma's past: At one point, the footage creeps through the sepulcher of an ancient mental institution where Alma underwent shock therapy in the '60s. Later on, it stalks through the dubious white of an Alabama cotton field, unraveling the details of Alma's horrific deflowering.

But we always return home eventually. Alma's house is a landslide of possessions, a retirement home for cockroaches, and a watering hole for the "witches, warlocks, and space aliens in the overhead" with whom she is known to converse. Alma's husband, notorious for the beatings belted out routinely from under the whiskeyed breath of his youth, has long since receded into a more introverted stage of old age. While Alma broadcasts from her own personalized version of reality, her husband is usually meshed into the surrounding shadows and heaps of belongings, emerging for comment only rarely, and then at his daughter's request. (Well, that is, if Margie really is his daughter: Alma floats the theory that Margie was conceived during astral sex with none other than Elvis Presley.)

Such delusional speculations are only the beginning of the multifarious hypotheses that we encounter throughout Alma. Rummaging through the layers of Alma's mental mirages, Margie is continually dredging up the truth of her own past, and surfacing with it are the real monsters of her childhood: sexual abuse, neglect, madness. Yet Margie stubbornly refuses the role of victim. To the contrary, she courageously and compassionately confronts these and other lurking demons in her past, laughing not in derision but in true recognition of the carnival-like atmosphere of her mad family.

Yet Alma is much more than a freak show. Alma's social outbursts--like when she speaks on the calming effect gunpowder has on the vagina--are always seen from her daughter's vantage point. And this choice prohibits us from drawing any convenient moralistic conclusions. Margie teaches us that we must view the situation not only with the analytical scalpel of the mind, but also from the pain-engulfing chambers of the heart. When I spoke with Margie by phone, she confirmed her original intention in making the film: to understand the circumstances not with bitterness, but with pathos.

Margie Thorpe will be on hand to introduce and answer questions about her documentary on Fri Feb 23 at 7 & 9 pm at the Grand Illusion.