Elephant

Gus Van Sant's Elephant, my latest DVD from Amazon, is a strange, remarkable film. I'd had it on my list for a while and was briefly tempted to take it off after the recent highschool shootings in America, but in the end I was intrigued by how Van Sant would approach the subject, and I wasn't disappointed.
It's defies all one's expectations. There's no 'plot', no building of character; it simply establishes an atmosphere of menace from the beginning without any of the usual strategies. Although the setting ( a day in the life of a average American high school) is, on one level, perfectly 'normal', from the beginning it is clear that something is not quite right. There's no explanation, no suggestions of any possible motivation, just 'this is what happened'. This makes the killings much scarier, bolt from the blue, which is, of course how such occurences actually happen in reality.
I found it a deeply impressive film; unsettling and very frightening, as you get far closer to the reality of such terrible events. It apparently upset some people: Todd McCarthy in Variety apparently called it 'pointless at best and irresponsible at worst'. The distinguished critic Roger Ebert disagreed, saying that Van Sant had made 'an anti-violence film by draining violence of energy, purpose, glamour, reward and social purpose'.
So, a truly remarkable film which will live long in the memory.