Home videos – especially the kind shot on early digital camcorders – appear etched with the texture of memories. For their fiction feature debut, Racornelia maximises the imperfections of this format to mount a documentary-style study of warts-and-all family dysfunction.

Set in 1990s Mexico City, the first half of the story unfolds over a tumultuous Christmas Eve dinner between bickering relatives. Both married with children, brothers Alejandro (Joaquin del Paso) and Octavio (Adolfo Jiménez Castro) are eager to show off their middle-class lifestyle. As the two families gather at Alejandro’s house, their wives Estelle (played by Racornelia) and Lisbette (Giovanna Duffour) enthusiastically join in the rivalry. Between courses and glasses of wine, sly insults fly as the young children are left to their own devices.

Delivered under the pretence of polite concern, these jabs gradually escalate in absurdity. When Alejandro announces Estelle’s second pregnancy, miffed Lisbette and Octavio vow to follow suit. That these sequences are purported to be filmed by the maids adds another layer of class critique to the heated arguments, exposing the rot behind the mask of bourgeois contentment.

The quick zooms and tight closeups also evoke the visual style of telenovelas, a storytelling mode simultaneously parodied and reconfigured here. Like many soap operas, Macdo is punctuated by shocking revelations and, as it moves from the dining room to the bedroom, the second half opens into marital discord and the casual cruelty of misogyny. If the first half is electrified by couples’ quarrelling, the rest comes off as an inert replay of the characters’ unpleasantness. Certain meta flourishes, such as split screens and flashing slogans, are perhaps meant as a distancing technique that implicates the viewer in what is happening on screen. Here, however, the stylisation starts to become laboured, a distraction rather than a provocation.

• Macdo is at the ICA, London from 6 March.