Film Reviews

Elephant

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Alex Frost
• Details: US / 81 mins / (No Cert).

A frank, uncompromising and rather uncomfortable movie, 'Elephant' documents a high school massacre by two disfranchised students. In a narrative that closely mirrors the terrible events of the 1999 Columbine school shootings, 'Elephant's linear narrative focuses on a number of students over the course of a single school day, which culminates in two kids - Eric and Alex (Deulen and Frost) - murdering scores of their classmates.
While the impending carnage is never far from the viewers' mind, Van Sant is interested in documenting the dislocation and sheer alienation that accompanies being a teenager in regular everyday America. His freestyle methods of filming - steady cams follow the kids as they go about their everyday business - and his innovative usage of the multi-perspective narrative is effective in coaxing the viewer to scratch the surface of these lives. But as the title suggests, and Van Sant hints at throughout, the signs were always there for violence to erupt in the school - just the authorities, the kids' parents and society in general choose to ignore it. When it comes to horrors, some will find Van Sant's observational, apparently non-judgemental tone to be the most frightening thing about 'Elephant'. He never offers pat explanations for the kids' actions or distils them into easily digestible caricatures of evil. What's even more upsetting is that it's really only a matter of time before the events described in 'Elephant' happen again.

Review by Garreth Murphy