In 2004 Jonathan Caouette made a film, Tarnation, about his tumultuous upbringing with his maternal grandparents and fractured, on-and-off-again relationship with his disturbed mother, Renee, who suffered from psychosis after undergoing shock treatments in her adolescence following a period of time being paralyzed. The movie became something of a media sensation for being edited on free iMovie software on a Mac and having a budget of only a couple hundred dollars (though subsequently brushed up sonically prior to a theatrical release), but it was no parlor trick. An intense and unsettling autobiographical bricolage, the movie had important things to say about psychological abuse and the familial legacy of mental illness.

Walk Away Renee represents Caouette’s follow-up to Tarnation, as it also centers around his 58-year-old mother, now living in a group home in Houston, diagnosed with acute bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder. While partially framed around a 2010 road trip to bring Renee to an assisted living facility closer to him, in New York, the film is, more broadly, an achingly melancholic, fairly haunting and inescapably human document that shines a light on some of the less typically discussed dimensions of mental illness.

The mode of its telling conforms to Caouette’s collagist instincts, incorporating digital home video footage, large swathes of photo flashback montage, probing but casual conversational footage, and even a staggering string of answering machine messages from his mother that captures the wild swings of her many moods. During the road trip, Caouette — wearing under his eyes the bags of someone who’s had to spend a lifetime emotionally bobbing and weaving — deals with lost medications and seemingly ad hominem attacks. But what gives this material extra depth and resonance (whether or not one has seen Tarnation) is his skillful touch with tapestral downheartedness.

In a sense, Walk Away Renee is both a love letter and a break-up letter. It shows a deep bond between single mother and only son, but also the limits of this relationship, and the veritable chasm that mental illness represents between those struggling with it and those who love them. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. To view the film online via VOD, click here. (Sundance Now, unrated, 88 minutes)