Dark Night

Almost 20 years on from the Columbine High School Mas­sacre, gun cul­ture and its fol­low­ing remain as strong as ever in the US. In a coun­try where firearms are read­i­ly avail­able, gun vio­lence is still preva­lent, as the Orlan­do Night­club Shoot­ing in 2016 proved. Tim Sutton’s Dark Night fol­lows the lives of sev­er­al inhab­i­tants of a Flori­da sub­urb at the time lead­ing up to a copy­cat mas­sacre of the 2012 Auro­ra Shoot­ing, com­mit­ted by James Holmes.

The film chal­lenges gun cul­ture, but does so in a more sub­tle way than 2002’s emo­tion­al­ly-charged Bowl­ing for Columbine by Michael Moore. For much of the film, the shooter’s iden­ti­ty is unclear, a move that cre­ates a sense of immi­nent threat from the very start. Instead we’re immersed in a world where more than one poten­tial shoot­er exists: is it a frus­trat­ed teen, a dis­tant army vet or an unsta­ble stalk­er? Each have their own rela­tion­ship with gun and are then giv­en a pri­vate focus. Here, Sutton’s obser­va­tion becomes clear: any one of them can get a gun and would like­ly be will­ing to use it.

How­ev­er, the greater cul­tur­al con­text of gun own­er­ship is also explored, specif­i­cal­ly the media’s role. Through TV shows depict­ing mass mur­der­er tri­als, radio report­ing shoot­ings and video games cre­at­ing worlds where there are no reper­cus­sions, Dark Night deft­ly illus­trates the con­stant expo­sure to fear and vio­lence peo­ple now face. The title’s allu­sion to Bat­man also links to the Auro­ra shoot­ing: as Holmes cov­ered his apart­ment in Bat­man para­pher­na­lia and opened fire dur­ing a show­ing of 2012’s The Dark Knight Ris­es. The film deliv­ers the sen­si­tive­ly argued case that mass shoot­ings are the prod­uct of the envi­ron­ment: one where vio­lence is admired in our enter­tain­ment indus­try, yet unfor­tu­nate­ly it does not deliv­er it’s crit­i­cism of the media with sim­i­lar clarity.

While Dark Night clocks in at a very mod­est 85 min­utes, the lengthy peri­ods of no dia­logue and exten­sive track­ing sequences make it feel much longer. The mes­meris­ing visu­als and defined shot com­po­si­tion are atmos­pher­ic, yet their lethar­gic nature allows inter­est to dis­si­pate. Nonethe­less, it remains an ambi­tious, rel­e­vant piece of film­mak­ing that promis­es to make you think.