Therapizing a School Shooting Through a Musical

There are a number of key the explanation why a film about a college capturing feels proper at dwelling at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s not a topic a major studio is prone to contact, so it’s more or less as much as unbiased filmmakers to deal with it. Given that these tragedies still occur all the time (there have been 400 college shootings in America over the last 10 years), the topic stays so loaded, and so wounding, that the dealing with of it requires excessive sensitivity and intelligence — qualities that Sundance stands for. But I’d be amiss if I didn’t point out a less noble motive. Audiences at Sundance have a means of going wild for a school-shooting film more than audiences in the outdoors world do, and while that could also be because they’re more open to it, it also hinges on a be aware of self-congratulation, a mind-set “Behold! We’re cool enough to have the courage to face this.”

Having seen “Run Amok” at its Sundance premiere today, I can testify that all those dynamics are in play. It’s not your typical school-shooter drama — however then, what’s? (The best one I’ve seen, Mass, premiered at Sundance in 2021.) It’s the story of a 13-year-old high-school freshman, Meg (performed by the exceptional newcomer Alyssa Marvin), whose mom, at artwork trainer, was killed in a college capturing 10 years before.

Meg, who now lives together with her Aunt Val and Uncle Dan (Molly Ringwald and Yul Vazquez) and her 17-year-old cousin, Penny (Sophia Torres), still goes to Lincoln High School. She was only three when the tragedy occurred there, so she was too younger to straight experience the horror. But the loss! It shadows her every day. Now that it’s been 10 years, the college has determined to do a “commemoration” ceremony, and Meg, having never really confronted any of this before, decides to go out on a limb. She’s going to “commemorate” the event that took her mom’s life by making a musical about it.

This sounds, on the floor, very high camp meets wuh? But “Run Amok,” relaxation assured, is a critical film. Meg, who performs the harp (which she actually wheels in a large case forwards and backwards to highschool), is musically inclined. She needs to create a musical, restaging the total college capturing, not as some type of sick joke, however because that’s the most instinctive means she is aware of to impress a catharsis. Meg has to battle the college directors, notably the scolding principal (Margaret Cho), who thinks it’s an outrageous concept; she’d favor that the 10-year ceremony be “uplifting.” But as we watch Meg, together with her owlish pluck and nerdish grin, start to run by way of the paces of restaging the tragedy, what she’s doing begins to look uplifting. It looks as if a good concept.

I just want that the film had run with it more, and that its tone weren’t all over the place. There are a variety of scenes in “Run Amok,” the first feature written and directed by NB Mager (she based it on her 2023 Oscar-qualifying quick), that play like the world’s most pious episode of “Glee” (at one point we see the youngsters rehearse school-shooting dance numbers set to the tune of Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” and Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”). At other factors, the movie is totally low-key and dramatic in the doleful coming-of-age-movie custom of “Eighth Grade.” The dinner-table scenes at dwelling, the place Meg faces off against Ringwald’s scowlingly correct aunt, conjure that acquainted Sundance style of glorified sitcom. And when a deranged trainer, performed by the often excellent however in this case atrociously over-the-top Bill Camp, begins capturing rubber bullets as he tries to homicide squirrels, we expect: What is this character even doing right here?   

Then there are the scenes the place Meg will get to know the mom of the shooter, a ghost of a lady named Nancy (Elizabeth Marvel), who tells her that her son “loved” Meg’s mom. This creates the tip of the iceberg of the movie’s most audacious concept — that the musical, which is ready to feature Meg’s cousin as the shooter, would possibly truly wish to explore what was happening inside him. As one in every of the college students places it, “How did we get to a place where this could happen?” My personal prejudice is that this is the actual query that must be requested about college shootings, in a means that calls for a solution past “Because we have terrible gun laws.” (Though we do certainly have horrible gun legal guidelines.) The hassle is, “Run Amok” raises the query…and then never takes two steps in the direction of making an attempt to reply it.

There’s another authority determine at college, a music trainer performed by Patrick Wilson (the movie’s government producer), who begins off as a hero (he was the one who killed the shooter with a gun) and, early on, he defends Meg’s musical. But he finally ends up being one in every of the oppressors. So do the academics who bond together, with their very own rubber-bullet weapons, to type the PTAA (Parent Teacher Arms Association), in a demagogic response to the issue of faculty security.

“Run Amok” is way from a mess, however it’s just quilted together sufficient in model so that it fails to build in energy. The film, in the end, doesn’t have an excessive amount of to say about the tradition of worry and violence that can live on at some faculties, though it’s exhausting to shake the feeling that it needs a pat on the again for having engaged the issue. “Run Amok” is the story of 1 woman’s path from worry to acceptance, and Alyssa Marvin, who has the uncommon actor’s reward of carrying her emotions on the outdoors even when the character she’s playing is holding them on the inside, makes that a convincing journey.