Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat

Casuistry? Gesundheit. For a strict definition, "specious argumentation" would be closer to the mark. Certainly, the nauseating crime at the center of this unsettling documentary would seem to fall under the category of poor reasoning: In 2001, three Toronto teens skinned a neighbor's pet alive for the purposes of making an art video. Alas, the thornier questions raised by their brutal act, both on legal grounds and aesthetic ones, also suffer from a lack of coherent argumentation, this time on the part of filmmaker Zev Asher, who comes close to being an exploiter.