SUNDANCE26 REVIEW: Run Amok [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 103 minutes
Director(s): NB Mager
Writer(s): NB Mager

It’s called catharsis, Meg.

The standout piece of NB Mager’s Run Amok is how it depicts discovery. Not just for the audience insofar as learning more about what happened ten years ago in the school shooting that claimed the life of freshman Meg’s (Alyssa Marvin) mother, but for the characters to start dismantling the narrative fed to them by their parents, community, and the media at-large. It really helps to expose the feedback loop of America’s desire to normalize provably avoidable horror.

Meg’s realization that she was on school property at the time. Blake’s (Pilot Bunch) realization that the teacher who died was the mother of his classmate. The realization that the shooter’s mother (Elizabeth Marvel’s Nancy) isn’t a monster by association. Or that those propped up as heroes, like Mr. Shelby (Patrick Wilson), might actually be exploiting the tragedy in ways that make their school more susceptible to it happening again.

That’s not to say Principal Linda’s (Margaret Cho) desire to sanitize the ten-year commemoration is better. Forgetting the suffering and ignoring the lessons that exist in looking back is just as harmful. It’s therefore not a mistake that both she and Shelby fear what Meg seeks to accomplish by creating an emotionally potent reenactment of the event to confront its truths. They’ve each created opposing fictional realities of safety in lieu of working towards a tangible solution.

Mager has pretty much boiled the story of American politics down to the fact that the people in power are always beholden to the whims of capitalistic self-interest. The sort that feeds them the lie that change isn’t possible despite how many of those being fed it grew up in a world that proved the opposite to be true. We are drowning in a sea of indoctrination that demands we sacrifice ourselves for the wealth of billionaires while receiving nothing in return.

Blake regurgitating his father’s party line of “school shootings preserve American culture” as though that’s a point of pride instead of an alarm bell. Linda asking for messages of “hope” so as not to dwell in sorrow despite the healing nature of acknowledging one’s pain as a means towards escaping it. Shelby aligning himself as the mascot of the newly formed PTAA (Parent Teacher Arms Association) to foster in a police state all while riding its coattails to a leadership position.

Are these parents, teachers, and administrative staff necessarily bad people? No. Most of them mean well. Most of them are just so deep into the lies that they’ve tricked themselves into thinking the solution to guns is more of them rather than fewer. So, the question we must ask ourselves is, “Who are they helping?” Not the children dealing with lock-down drills and the fear of getting shot in school. No. They’re helping themselves. They’re clinging to a broken status quo.

Their idea of protection is ignorance because they know they cannot win the fight if the next generation realizes they’ve been marked as lambs to slaughter. The initial plan is to cut Meg out of the ceremony. Then, when she finds out, it is to neuter her impact by asking her to simply sing “Amazing Grace.” So, it’s no surprise that she would revolt. What are they hiding? Why are they trying to silence her? By attempting to scare her, they embolden her instead.

Mager knows that she cannot depict this reality through authentic severity without alienating the section of her audience that most needs to hear her message. So, she goes full farce by turning the adults into caricatures—pushing them so far to their archetypical extreme that laughter and shock value hit us before we have time to wonder, “Is she making fun of me?” These are pitiable creatures desperately reaching for masks their children no longer see.

There’s as much intrigue in how the adults react as the kids because of this. Yes, the real meat is giving Meg, Penny (Sophia Torres), Blake, and the others the room to figure out their place in this nightmare they were born into. How they respond, rebel, and evolve to take back control of their own narrative is inspiring and, as Wilson said during the Q&A, necessary since the older generation has failed. But I also love how Val (Molly Ringwald) chooses to grow too.

Because it’s funny watching Shelby’s thinly veiled descent into right wing opportunism and Mr. Hunt’s (Bill Camp … yes, the adult cast is truly stacked) loosening grip on sanity when forced into a militarized role no teacher should ever have. It’s funny to see what governmental inaction and unchecked lobbying has done to America because the alternative is abject futility. But it’s also nice to know the kids aren’t alone. That some adults can wake from their delusion.

It only happens, though, if those kids take up the fight. If they shed the fascist tools those billionaires have created to make them docile automatons and pursue the truth by asking questions and seeking answers. Find out what happened. Learn that the perpetrators are often confused. That fearmongering is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Are school shooters inherently the “strange kids” or have we taught our children to treat them as such in ways that help create them?