‘Run Amok’ Review: A Drama About a School Shooting, and Therapizing It Through a Musical, Is Notable for the Performance of Alyssa Marvin

There are several key reasons why a movie about a school shooting feels right at home at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s not a subject a major studio is likely to touch, so it’s 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 — qualities that Sundance stands for. But I’d be amiss if I didn’t 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 might be because they’re more open to it, it also hinges on a note of self-congratulation, a way of thinking “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 — but then, what is? (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 (played by the remarkable newcomer Alyssa Marvin), whose mother, at art teacher, was killed in a school shooting 10 years before.

Meg, 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’s been 10 years, the school has decided to do a “commemoration” ceremony, and Meg, having never truly confronted any of this before, decides to go out on a limb. She’s going to “commemorate” the event that took her mother’s life by making a musical about it.

This sounds, on the surface, very high camp meets wuh? But “Run Amok,” 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’s 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’s an outrageous idea; she’d prefer for the 10-year ceremony to be “uplifting.” But as we watch Meg, with her owlish pluck and nerd grin, begin to run through the paces of restaging the tragedy, what she’s doing starts to look uplifting. It seems like a good idea.

I just wish that the movie had run with it more, and that its tone weren’t all over the place. There are a number of scenes in which “Run Amok,” the first feature written and directed by NB Mager (she based it on her 2023 Oscar-qualifying short), plays like the world’s most pious episode of “Glee” (at one point we see the kids rehearse school-shooting dance numbers set to the tune of Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” and Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”). At others, the film is completely low-key and dramatic in the doleful coming-of-age-movie tradition of “Eighth Grade.” The dinner-table scenes at home, where Meg faces off against Ringwald’s 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 tried to murder squirrels, we think: What is this character even doing here?   

Then 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 “loved” Meg’s mother. This creates the tip of the iceberg of the film’s most audacious idea — that the musical, which is set to feature Meg’s cousin as the shooter, might actually want to explore what was going on inside him. As one of the students puts it, “How did we get to a place where this could happen?” 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 “Because we have terrible gun laws.” (Though we certainly do have terrible gun laws.) The trouble is, “Run Amok” raises the question…and then never takes two steps towards trying to answer it.

There’s another authority figure at school, a music teacher played by Patrick Wilson (the film’s executive producer), who starts off as a hero (he was the one who killed the shooter with a gun) and, early on, defends Meg’s 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.

“Run Amok” is far from a mess, but it’s just quilted together enough in style so that it fails to build in power. The movie, in the end, doesn’t have all that much to say about the culture of fear and violence that can live on at some schools, though it’s hard to shake the feeling that it wants a pat on the back for having engaged the issue. “Run Amok” is the story of one girl’s path from fear to acceptance, and Alyssa Marvin, who has the rare actor’s gift of wearing her feelings on the outside even when the character she’s playing is holding them on the inside, makes it a convincing journey.