If you aren’t watching Run Amok closely, you’ll mistake it for a Hallmark Original movie. Everyone’s sweet and quirky in this town haunted by a ten-year-old tragedy, and gosh darn it, they just want to be helpful. Everyone wants to protect and nurture; everyone’s about empathy and heroism. It’s a model for memorial and—
Screw that. Run Amok is dark as shit, and I love it.
Meg (Alyssa Marvin) lost her mom to a school shooting when she was four. Now a freshman at that very school, Meg convinces the heroic Mr. Shelby (Patrick Wilson) to let her stage a commemorative play about that incident. It’s for “catharsis”, the ninth-grader insists. It’ll help people heal. Shelby and the principal (Margaret Cho) suggest they’ll sing “Amazing Grace”.
Meg has other ideas. Seeking to understand her mother’s final moments and how a student came to gun her down in a hallway, Meg writes a musical reenactment. Backed by an eclectic team that includes her cousin Penny (Sophia Torres), Meg writes so ambitiously that she visits the home of the shooter’s mother—and ruffles many feathers along the way.
When Run Amok follows Meg as she shapes and directs her show, the film is stirring. With no hyperbole whatsoever, Marvin is incredible, giving Meg this awkward, childish innocence and a grown-up-too-fast maturity that lets her weaponize adults’ pity. There’s a scene where she narrates the shooting in complete detail that tore me apart. Marvin plays it cool and collected, crisply maneuvering her riveted older peers through their blocking, never betraying the emotion you read into every pause and gaze. I know nothing about this actress, not even her age, but if she’s really a high schooler, I think she might win three Oscars someday. Meg might be my favorite teenage movie character ever, and Marvin deserves much of the praise.
Mager does, too. It’s clear that she gets Meg, that she’s crafted a character defined by tragedy who refuses to accept that, but also who fears losing touch with it. There’s an easy way to write this story that results in warm hugs and sappy crescendos, but Run Amok wields empathy in this subversive way I’ve never seen before. The scenes between Meg and the shooter’s mother (Elizabeth Marvel) are awkward, unsettling, and grim, yet they subtly stab you with heartbreak when a tupperware of rice appears. Factoring in her incredible direction of a cast both young and veteran—Molly Ringwald and Bill Camp join Wilson and Cho—Mager deserves more opportunities. You can tell there’s huge talent behind this thing.
Everything doesn’t work, of course. The opening ten minutes suffer from horrendous pacing, with huge character shifts that aren’t remotely earned. Camp’s character in particular inhabits an emotional uncanny valley that’s way too slapstick for the intended tone, and the arm-the-teachers stuff becomes way too big in a way that it shouldn’t. I get why she included them to flesh out the story, but they distracted from the real star: the right choice was stepping aside so Marvin and the other kids could grapple with the weight of inherited violence.
It pains me to acknowledge all that because I want to sing this film’s praises. Mager nails so many things here, and her movie crushed me over and over again. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating and writing about the threat of violence in schools, and Run Amok stands apart from its similarly centered brethren by focusing (brilliantly) on the way grief lingers and perverts over time. I’ve never seen anything like this before; The Fallout comes close, but that Jenna Ortega vehicle speaks to numbness rather than confrontation. Run Amok is about kids far removed from the violence who still feel it, and about the staff members still defined and haunted by it.
While Run Amok drops the ball at the end and definitely doesn’t stick the landing—although kudos to Mager for having the guts to do what she does during the show—I find myself shrugging my objections off. There’s so much to love here, and Marvin is so transcendent that I simply don’t care. I realize this is probably too dark and weird to ever gain mainstream acclaim, but who cares?
Run Amok isn’t the best film I caught at Sundance this year, but it’s certainly the one I’ll remember the fondest.
That’s definitely something to celebrate.
Watched via the Sundance Film Festival's Online Screening
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