bathos

Open Roads, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden take on the emotional depths of family life in ways that shred the heartstrings — mostly without slipping into bathos.

Yet even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay.

The grid — a modernist pictorial device that she deploys with postmodernist bathos — is rendered in wonky, spray-painted lines or a loose pink and brown checkerboard.

But it also lapsed into bathos at times, in galleries about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, or a shrine to journalists killed while on duty.

Shot in Utica, N.Y., and boasting locations that set a high bar for starkness, “Clean” has some real craft, but doesn’t quite satisfy as it toggles between bloodbaths and bathos.