{"id":260246,"date":"2026-01-27T15:24:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T15:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/260246\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T15:24:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T15:24:09","slug":"therapizing-a-school-shooting-through-a-musical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/260246\/","title":{"rendered":"Therapizing a School Shooting Through a Musical"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere are several key reasons why a movie about a school shooting feels right at home at the Sundance Film Festival<\/a>. It\u2019s not a subject that a major studio is likely to touch, so it\u2019s more or less up to independent filmmakers to tackle it. Given that these tragedies still happen all the time (there have been 400 school shootings in America over the last 10 years), the subject remains so loaded, and so wounding, that the handling of it requires extreme sensitivity and intelligence \u2014 qualities that Sundance stands for. But I\u2019d be amiss if I didn\u2019t mention a less noble reason. Audiences at Sundance have a way of going wild for a school-shooting movie more than audiences in the outside world do, and while that may be because they\u2019re more open to it, it also hinges on a note of self-congratulation, a way of thinking \u201cBehold! We\u2019re cool enough to have the courage to face this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHaving seen \u201cRun Amok<\/a>\u201d at its Sundance premiere today, I can testify that all those dynamics are in\u00a0play. It\u2019s not your typical school-shooter drama \u2014 but then, what is? (The best one I\u2019ve seen, Mass<\/a>, premiered at Sundance in 2021.) It\u2019s the story of a 13-year-old high-school freshman, Meg (played by the remarkable newcomer Alyssa Marvin), whose mother, at art teacher, was killed in a school shooting 10 years before.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeg, who now lives 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 happened there, so she was too young to directly experience the horror. But the loss! It shadows her every day. Now that it\u2019s been 10 years, the school has decided to do a \u201ccommemoration\u201d ceremony, and Meg, having never truly confronted any of this before, decides to go out on a limb. She\u2019s going to \u201ccommemorate\u201d the event that took her mother\u2019s life by making a musical about it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis sounds, on the surface, very high camp meets wuh? But \u201cRun Amok,\u201d rest assured, is a serious movie. Meg, who plays the harp (which she literally wheels in a huge case back and forth to school), is musically inclined. She wants to create a musical, restaging the entire school shooting, not as some sort of sick joke, but because that\u2019s the most instinctive way she knows to provoke a catharsis. Meg has to battle the school administrators, notably the scolding principal (Margaret Cho), who thinks it\u2019s an outrageous idea; she\u2019d prefer that the 10-year ceremony be \u201cuplifting.\u201d But as we watch Meg, with her owlish pluck and nerdish grin, start to run through the paces of restaging the tragedy, what she\u2019s doing begins to look uplifting. It seems like a good idea.<\/p>\n

\n\tI just wish that the movie had run with it more, and that its tone weren\u2019t all over the place. There are a number of scenes in \u201cRun Amok,\u201d the first feature written and directed by NB Mager (she based it on her 2023 Oscar-qualifying short), that play like the world\u2019s most pious episode of \u201cGlee\u201d (at one point we see the kids rehearse school-shooting dance numbers set to the tune of Britney Spears\u2019 \u201c\u2026Baby One More Time\u201d and Roberta Flack\u2019s \u201cKilling Me Softly\u201d). At other points, the film is completely low-key and dramatic in the doleful coming-of-age-movie tradition of \u201cEighth Grade.\u201d The dinner-table scenes at home, where Meg faces off against Ringwald\u2019s scowlingly proper aunt, conjure that familiar Sundance genre of glorified sitcom. And when a deranged teacher, played by the usually superb but in this case atrociously over-the-top Bill Camp, starts shooting rubber bullets as he tries to murder squirrels, we think: What is this character even doing here?\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThen there are the scenes where Meg gets to know the mother of the shooter, a ghost of a woman named Nancy (Elizabeth Marvel), who tells her that her son \u201cloved\u201d Meg\u2019s mother. This creates the tip of the iceberg of the film\u2019s most audacious idea \u2014 that the musical, which is set to feature Meg\u2019s cousin as the shooter, might actually want to explore what was going on inside him. As one of the students puts it, \u201cHow did we get to a place where this could happen?\u201d My own prejudice is that this is the exact question that needs to be asked about school shootings, in a way that demands an answer beyond \u201cBecause we have terrible gun laws.\u201d (Though we do indeed have terrible gun laws.) The trouble is, \u201cRun Amok\u201d raises the question\u2026and then never takes two steps towards trying to answer it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s another authority figure at school, a music teacher played by Patrick Wilson (the film\u2019s executive producer), who starts off as a hero (he was the one who killed the shooter with a gun) and, early on, defends Meg\u2019s musical. But he ends up being one of the oppressors. So do the teachers who bond together, with their own rubber-bullet guns, to form the PTAA (Parent Teacher Arms Association), in a demagogic response to the issue of school safety.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRun Amok\u201d is far from a mess, but it\u2019s just quilted together enough in style that it fails to build in power. The movie, in the end, doesn\u2019t have too much to say about the culture of fear and violence that can live on at some schools, though it\u2019s hard to shake the feeling that it wants a pat on the back for having engaged the issue. \u201cRun Amok\u201d is the story of one girl\u2019s path from fear to acceptance, and Alyssa Marvin, who has the rare actor\u2019s gift of wearing her feelings on the outside even when the character she\u2019s playing is holding them on the inside, makes that a convincing journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are several key reasons why a movie about a school shooting feels right at home at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397,137209,48764],"class_list":["post-260246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-run-amok","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}