Elephant

Elephant is a twisted movie. It is the scariest and most harrowing film I have ever seen. I have never been so absolutely disgusted and felt as sick to my stomach than the last twenty minutes of Gus Van Sant's masterpiece. We open and are introduced to around three or four high school kids. One's father is a drunk, the other is ugly--thus an outcast, and another is a zealous photographer who goes through the motions of developing film with as languid a pace as the film itself. I could eat a meal while watching the first hour. It's so sweet and gorgeously filmed, the characters are so authentic and effuse auras of high schoolers. And yet, the first hour is creepy. The color palette is uncomfortably pallid, the tension and problems as familiar as the real high school hallways I walk. And then...disaster. In recent days, we got a terrible spree killer, a lunatic, across the headlines of the news. We try to rationalize it. We try to place the blame on specific mediums like the television or some idiot head banger. Elephant gorgeously suggests otherwise. Perhaps crazy just wells up out of life, out of tension, out of the world. In the last twenty minutes of Elephant as sadistic killers roam the halls, we understand that there is no rationalizing evil.