For far too many Americans and the politicians they support at the local and national levels, mass shootings (400 just last year), specifically school shootings (roughly half that number), qualify as a reasonable tradeoff in exchange for protecting their inviolable Second Amendment rights.
Owning and using firearms defines their personal and political identities. Any infringement, any curtailment, even common-sense gun reforms, are seen as an existential threat and thus must be opposed without compromise or the possibility of compromise.
Except for the occasional mass shooting covered by the mainstream media (cue handwringing, thoughts and prayers sent and unanswered, unaccountable politcians uttering pro forma platitudes, saying nothing and doing nothing), firearm-related violence has become background noise, but not for school-age children and their immediate predecessors, who have or had to undergo repeated active shooter drills, living in a constant state of fear and anxiety, while the adults around them pretend otherwise.
For writer-director NB Mager, adapting her 2023 festival short into her feature-length debut, Run Amok, there’s nothing more urgent than examining the long-term social, cultural, and psychological consequences of school shootings, albeit from a singularly skewed, blackly comic perspective. It’s a necessary, if, at least for some, frustrating, response to a popular culture that consciously avoids addressing the hardest, most pressing subjects.
Like Mager’s short, Run Amok centers on Meg (Alyssa Martin, revelatory), orphaned by the school shooting that took her mother from her a decade earlier, and her freshman year in the same high school where her art-teacher mother taught and died. Mager invests the Meg character with a uniquely quirky personality: Bright, practically brilliant, insightful, yet only haltingly engaged with her emotions, struggling to find a place for herself in high school (she’s a typical, maybe even stereotypical nerd), her family, and the community at large.
Taken in by her aunt Val (Molly Ringwald, an always welcome presence), uncle Dan (Yul Vazquez), and older cousin, Penny (Sophia Torres), after her mother’s death, Meg has a stable, supportive home, a family that cares for her and her well-being, but she still feels — and acts like — an outsider, if not an outright pariah, a perpetual guest in her aunt and uncle’s home. It doesn’t help that Penny, four years older and a senior, has turned away from her, refusing to give her a ride to school or interact with her except out of necessity.
With the 10th anniversary of the school shooting, however, the school’s leadership has decided on a “commemoration” of the event, a somber reflection and memorialization of the shooter’s victims, including Meg’s mother, and the survivors. Led by Mr. Shelby (Patrick Wilson), the music teacher who heroically intervened, thwarting the mass shooter before his spree took even more lives, the commemoration will celebrate and mourn the lives lost through speeches, songs, and performances.
Learning the definition of the word “catharsis” (a purging of negative emotions) from the librarian, Meg attaches herself to the idea like a drowning girl to a life vest. If she can bring a measure of catharsis to the high-school community (teachers, administrators, and, of course, students), then she can make sense out of a senseless act: art as therapy and vice versa. And it won’t involve another tasteful rendition of “Amazing Grace” by Meg and the other students, but a dramatic recreation of the shooting itself, interspersed with musical numbers penned by Meg herself.
Martin’s performance practically thrums with unresolved emotional anguish, a constant attempt to gloss over the life-altering loss of her mother with an intellectualism that time and again proves inadequate to the task. As Meg seeks answers, ostensibly for the musical she’s in the process of writing, including the “why” behind the shooter’s actions, she finds herself further and further away from any kind of certainty.
Even spending time with the shooter’s self-exiled mother, Nancy (Elizabeth Marvel), doesn’t provide Meg with the answers she desperately wants, but it does, in its own halting, circular way, result in an unexpected emotional bond. They’ve both lost someone they loved unconditionally and, worse, must continue living with their unavoidable absence. For Nancy, it also means living every day with a crushing sense of guilt, of not seeing the signs of mental instability in her son, his anger, his frustration, his potential for violence, in time, and stopping him before he could act.
With far more unresolved questions than answers (a deliberate, conscious choice), not to mention a running thread involving an obsessive, obviously traumatized, squirrel-chasing teacher, Mr. Hunt (Bill Camp), ineffectual, compromised adult teachers and parents, frequent tonal changes, and a subject matter that doesn’t lend itself easily to black comedy or social satire, Run Amok's take of a post-school shooting world will likely alienate as many moviegoers as it engages, if not more.
Just as unmistakably, Run Amok announces Mager as a major new talent, a talent whose next film, whatever that might be, should be at the top of any filmgoer’s must-see list.
Run Amok premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.