In Black River Falls, Wisconsin, people can’t seem to stop committing suicide. As related in James Marsh’s dark and relentless 1999 documentary, turn-of-the-century epidemics of diphtheria, famine, depression, arson, vandalism, drug use, witchcraft, Satanism, and, of course, murder made this northern-Wisconsin outpost a quagmire of debauchery and despair. Rendered in artful black-and-white dramatizations, the town’s archived newspapers provide morbid fodder as Ian Holm narrates the chronicles of woe. But Marsh belabors the grotesque, and shock gives way to nausea as he piles on accounts of unexplained suicides, abandoned children, psychotic delusions, and other gory vignettes, all excerpted from Michael Lesy’s 1973 book of the same name. The eerie, American Gothic mise-en-scène of yesteryear, intercut with the less threatening, Walmart-friendly town of today, brings up a question Marsh doesn’t address: why would anybody ever want to live in this tundra wasteland?