Critic's Notebook

Tandem Pictures

The publicity material for “Run Amok” describes its subject matter as “thorny,” although it’s the approach to the topic that might make a viewer tense up. That topic is the ongoing plague of U.S. school shootings, and the approach is a deliberate tonal jumble of pathos, sincerity, tragedy and whimsy; something for everyone (to be cross with). But the goal is for a fictional young shooting survivor to speak for herself, once she’s untangled the knot of snakes in her head; to accept that even she may not know how she feels so asking about it all the time might go nowhere. And certainly to point out that solutions to school shootings do not lie inside the schools.

Ten years after a student shot and killed three other students and one teacher, current freshman Meg (Alyssa Marvin) wants to commemorate the event at the same school through the unexpected medium of musical theater. This would be a dicey proposition even if Meg were not the daughter of the murdered teacher, which she is; and had not been present at the shooting as a 3-year-old, which she was. In the circumstances no one at the school feels they can tell her no. One man who could, music teacher Mr. Shelby (Patrick Wilson), carries his own scars from the shooting and clearly thinks that any form of therapy is worth a shot. Poor Meg’s mental state is fragile and confused. She’s introduced hauling a large harp case around; not quite a cross on the Via Dolorosa but the symbolism is similar. She recruits her classmates to portray the shooting victims, which for the most part they embrace as a meaty opportunity to act out. And she gets her cousin Penny (Sophia Torres, with the air of Hailee Steinfeld) to play the shooter, ie. the boy who murdered Penny’s own aunt and others.

This leads to a macabre sequence in which Meg rehearses her cast through the shooting itself in the school corridor where it took place, with Penny miming the shootings and her friends falling “dead” on cue. The scene coexists with later ones in which students perform “. . . Baby One More Time” (as in “hit me baby”) and “Killing Me Softly with His Song” in the context of deaths by gunfire. A viewer wonders what the hell they’re playing at; but this is the point. The sickness of past shootings has planted deep roots and the pain flowers in bizarre ways. The staff are poisoned too: woodworking teacher Mr. Hunt (Bill Camp) is tense to the point of fracture, reacting to any sudden noises like a ‘Nam veteran.

“Run Amok” has even more sympathy for Nancy (Elizabeth Marvel), the shooter’s mother, who has simply been broken in half. Desperate to articulate the unfathomable, Nancy tells Meg that “Everything went wrong in his head.” To which Meg retorts, “His head was your job!” From this Meg ponders having her musical take an understanding view of the killer, one last thorny conceit for a pile that proves rather too high for the film to carry to the finish line. Nothing in it exactly parallels Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux,” apart from the theory that dry realism isn’t much of an angle on a musical young girl traumatized by a school shooting; all wrong for tackling something so mad that only the mad would permit it to become commonplace. Meg scrambles to repair herself after the worst day of her life, without her or the film addressing that it might all happen again tomorrow.