Summary:
A dramatization of the Montreal Massacre of 1989.
My Thoughts:
As much as I love director Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”, “Blade Runner 2049”, “Sicario”), I sort of take issue with movies that turn real life tragedies into entertainment, so I put off watching this film for a long time. If the films in question still receive generally positive reviews I’ll usually end up seeing it (see my review for “Hotel Mumbai”), but still, I always feel a little uncomfortable watching films like these; it’s as if we’re looking for entertainment in a place where other people experienced real horror, pain, and death.
At the same time, I know that films like these are important because they help us to remember that these events shook the world when they happened, and helps us to remember those victims that shouldn’t be forgotten. I guess I’m always inwardly conflicted when I watch films like this, and that certainly has affected my review here. I guess what I’m trying to say is from a filmmaking standpoint, this movie is really well done, but from a moral standpoint, I don’t know what to think about this movie.
“If I have a boy, I’ll teach him to love. If I have a girl, I’ll tell her the world is hers.”
As a soon-to-be mass-murdering misogynist (Maxim Gaudette, “Incendies”) prepares for his killing spree at the Montreal Engineering School Ecole Polytechnique, students Jean-Francois (Sebastien Huberdeau, “The Barbarian Invasions”), Valerie (Karine Vanasse, “X-Men: Days of Future Past”), and Stephanie (Evelyne Brochu, “Pawn Sacrifice”) all go about their ordinary days, unaware that tragedy is about to fall.
As I’ve already mentioned, this movie is based on a true story. I’m not going to throw up spoiler tags because this movie wouldn’t have been made if the horrific event hadn’t occurred. You the viewer should know before you start this film that you’re going into a movie about a school shooting. So, here’s what happened: A lone gunman with an anti-feminist agenda entered a university in Montreal on December 6th, 1989. He walked into a mechanical engineering class, ordered the men and women to separate, and then he shot all nine women. After that he prowled the corridors and cafeterias, picking off students as he came across them. In the end, he killed fourteen women, and injured ten more women and four men. Then he shot himself.
The way this film is directed and shot is probably the best part. The cinematography is in black and white, often paired with quick, violent cuts, and jarring handheld shots. This movie makes you feel like you’re right there with the victims as they duck under desks, flee through halls, and do their best to avoid detection. This is not a fun movie, but it captures that feeling of terror that the students in that university must’ve felt as the killer stalked those halls.
Another thing that helped this movie was the way that this story was structured. We spend time meeting the killer and learning his misguided ideologies before he starts his massacre, but we also spend time with a number of students that were either in the mechanical engineering classroom where the killer first opened fire, or they were on the campus at the time, and soon became aware of what was going on. The way that the story is structured makes it so that we cut back and forth in the timeline, at times seeing things that happened prior to the shooting, a few weeks after the shooting, and sometimes we even see an event occur twice, from the differing perspectives of different students. In doing this, the film sort of feels a bit like “Rashomon”, or any other multi-angled story. It keeps the story interesting because we learn different things as the film goes on that gives other instances more meaning. For example, at one point a man runs down a hall and sees blood trickled down said hall; later, from a different perspective, we see a wounded girl get up and walk down that same hall, dripping blood as she walks, and then she walks back to a different room when the killer starts to head in her direction. The layered storytelling approached really helped to keep the film engaging and moving.
While the shooting sequences were the most impactful, and also the most impressive in terms of technique, the dramatic scenes were a bit rougher to get through. The scene that depicts survivor Jean-Francois (Huberdeau) going home to have dinner with his mother is downright awkward; it’s full of cliché lines and awkward acting; but when Francois is running through the school, terrified out of his mind, those scenes are fine. There’s just a bit of a disconnect between the quality of acting in the shooting vs tamer scenes, and it feels sort of jarring at times.
Verdict:
This is a very well done movie, but I honestly won’t recommend it to many people just due to its subject material. If you want to see this movie, that’s your prerogative; I watched it once and thought it was good, and I never really need to see it again. I’m much more keen to watch Villeneuve’s other films, which might be more violent and disturbing (“Prisoners”), but at least they aren’t exploiting the real-life victims of a mass shooting for entertainment.
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