Film has never shied away from covering contentious and difficult subject matter. Art is a vessel for confronting our most pressing issues, working through them, and healing. The Sundance Film Festival is certainly no stranger to hosting films that embrace difficult subject matter. Writer-director NB Mager takes it all on in her feature debut, Run Amok, adapted from her Oscar-qualifying short film of the same name.
Meg (Alyssa Marvin) attempts to process the infamous school shooting that took the life of her mother by staging a musical. With the help of her cousin Penny (Sophia Torres) and her teacher Mr. Shelby (Patrick Wilson), Meg soon discovers what it really means to confront her trauma. The film centers on people using art to confront major issues while critiquing those issues and the responses to them.
Mager’s film is strongest when it focuses on the healing that comes from art. Meg and Penny’s relationship begins contentious, but as they work on the musical, we watch them find each other again.
They build a stage in their shared room, performing for no one as they work through the blossoming show. Despite the heavy material, there’s so much joy pouring out of the duo as they play around with their creation.
Likewise, we watch as students who are socially at odds step out of their boxes and build relationships. Blake (Pilot Bunch), a bro exuding bravado, initially treats the show as a bit of a joke at the audition. As the film goes on, though, we see him perform interpretive dance with the intensity of a Joffrey Ballet performer, alongside Opal (Nuha Jes Izman), a timid girl, and Sue Ellen (Grace Reiter), an intense theater kid. These kids, who normally wouldn’t spend any time together, eagerly seek out each other’s company because of the show.
Mager also effectively captures the generational divide and how tragedy reverberates differently across a community. Meg and her friends seek to make sense of the tragedy, going so far as to walk the exact route the shooter took years ago. But they treat it with the utmost reverence.
The adults, meanwhile, seek to commemorate the incident in the most sanitized way possible. They want to honor the incident without actually talking about what happened. One of the teachers, Mr. Hunt (Bill Camp), actively walks around the campus with clear PTSD but is repeatedly dismissed as dangerous rather than given proper help.
We watch as the world tries to move on from the tragedy without addressing the root cause or investing in measures to prevent it from happening again. Violence begets more violence, and the cycle repeats, traumatizing the next generation.
Mager actively dives into the uncomfortable gray with these situations as Meg builds a relationship with the shooter’s mother (Elizabeth Marvel). There’s no clear answer, and Mager doesn’t attempt to provide. She simply posits that things are much more nuanced than they seem.
She takes this further with the glorification of Mr. Shelby, who emerged from the incident as a hero. He and the shooting are mythologized over the course of the film, and it puts the incident into a much cleaner context for everyone to digest: evil shooter taken down by hero. Meg and company, however, wrestle with the fact that it may not be so simple.
These complicated conversations are repeatedly undercut by the repeated tonal pivots throughout. Oftentimes, it feels like we’re watching several different films unfold, from quirky indie comedy to absurdist satire to dark drama. This film’s biggest struggle is that these tones never coalesce into something consistent or cohesive. Because Mager is switching so abruptly (sometimes in the same scene), it undermines any sort of meaningful impact from the larger conversations.
It all eventually crumbles under the weight of this and can’t manage to stick the landing. Run Amok ends on an inconclusive, rushed note that feels thrown together because it didn’t know how to put a button on the film. It’s frustrating because the film has such a clear idea of what it wants to say from the jump.
Run Amok doesn’t totally miss the mark, though, thanks to Marvin’s incredible performance. What starts as a two-dimensional caricature gradually cracks open as the weight of processing this incident pushes down on this young woman. In other hands, the whole thing may have fallen apart, but Marvin manages to pull you in, even when the film itself isn’t completely meshing.
Mager has a lot to say about the world and says it unapologetically. While the tonal inconsistencies undermine the heavier conversations, Run Amok signals the arrival of an ambitious new voice that fully grasps what art can do and be.
Review Courtesy of Adam Patla
Feature Image Courtesy of Sundance Institute