Boo Hoo
1975 · 17m · Canada
Directed by Grant Munro
Genres: dark comedy, documentary
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A retired cemetery superintendent wanders the Saint John grounds sharing prolific, sometimes bizarre anecdotes about mourners, monuments, and his off-beat working life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people see a retired cemetery guy and hear maudlin nostalgia—Munro instead builds a deadpan riff on mortality that refuses sentiment, letting the anecdotes pile up like stones until the whole thing tips into something genuinely unhinged.
Munro's command of the essay-documentary form is precise: he lets digression become structure, turning the superintendent's rambling into a formally rigorous meditation on how we narrate death and memory—this sits comfortably in the lineage of literary documentary, where personality and craft are inseparable.
The decision to let the subject's voice *become* the film—no editorializing, no score crutch, just anecdotes stacking into an accidental portrait—is what lifts this from quirky-old-man piece into something that trusts the audience completely.