The concept of Run Amok is alarmingly close to bad taste. The execution of the concept of Run Amok also requires all the adults here to be really bad at adulting, which is unlikely. But if you can get past both of those things – a pretty large if – then it’s possible to appreciate the way Run Amok’s difficult subject matter is handled with the necessary lightness. But oh man, it’s not easy.
Meg (a heartbreaking Alyssa Marvin) lives with her older, cooler cousin Penny (Sophia Torres) and her aunt Val and uncle Dan (Molly Ringwald and Yul Vazquez) in an unnamed, snowy American suburb. Meg is a massive dork – she plays the harp, for pete’s sake – and starting her freshman year at the local high school where she’s already known to the music teacher, Mr. Shelby (the underappreciated Patrick Wilson). Ten years ago at this high school there was a shooting, in which Mr. Shelby was involved and several people died. The current students have decided to stage a musical performance, largely written by Meg, to mark the anniversary of this unhappy day. This horrifies the school staff, starting with the principal (Margaret Cho in a thankless performance), but Meg has a connection to the incident which means they can’t quite tell her no. And in a lovely act of young solidarity, a group of other kids, starting with Penny, decide to back Meg up.
What writer-director NB Mager is dealing with here is how children process the unthinkable, and how, when adults refuse to talk about it, children do it anyway. Val and Dan spend mandatory family dinners insisting the girls discuss the “roses and thorns” of their day, but it’s also clear they have never made Meg feel like she’s fully their child. For a family with such anxiety it’s surprising they let their girls commute to school by themselves, or occasionally stay out overnight without so much as a phone call. You’d also think they’d prioritise physical safety over mental health, but then again the adult staff of the school all holster orange rubber-bullet guns to keep their students safe. But those can do plenty of damage to innocent people, as a friend of Meg’s named Elton (Jim Kaplan) learns to his cost.
Mr. Shelby’s total failure to oversee or guide Meg’s production is waved away due to his trust in the fourteen-year-old Meg’s maturity, which is laughable. Meg, Penny and their friends use acting-character workshop techniques to discuss people’s motivations in ways which both are incredibly insightful and incredibly childish. Shachar Langlev films everything with forthright brightness, and Holly McClintock’s costumes involve a lot of cozy knitwear to make everything feel very safe. And yet the students’ age-appropriate half-understanding of what happened should have been apparent to the adults much sooner than the big finale. What’s more, the uncomfortable yet plausible relationship Meg strikes up with an adult neighbour named Nancy (Elizabeth Marvel) would have been much more powerful if Nancy had been able to meet Meg’s emotional needs in a way Val does not. The way their relationship unfolds is a major missed opportunity. But Ms. Mager is not making a story about adults capable of doing the right things. It’s about how kids must process this kind of trauma whether they get any help or not.
The black comedy The Musical, also about children processing trauma on the school stage at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, was a better success because of its focus on the misbehaving adults. But it’s clear from both of these films that America has simply no idea how to tell our children not only what we have become but also why we’re like this. From the point of view of an emotional teenager, Run Amok will probably resonate strongly. But from the point of view of an adult, the immaturity of the insights here prevents Run Amok from being a truly good film.
One final thing: one of Meg’s friends is played by an actor named Pilot Bunch, whose parents deserve a medal for giving their baby such an excellent name.
Run Amok recently played at the Sundance Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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