Tsk

The high-school massacre has almost become a literary sub-genre on its own in recent years, with Coupland's Hey, Nostredamus!; DBC Pierre's Man Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little and perhaps most impressively of all, Ray Loriga's lean masterpiece My Brother's Gun. So it's little surprise that cinema has embarked on its own exploration of a sub-Columbine incident, although while those books mentioned deal with the aftermath of such shootings, Gus Van Sant's Elephant(2003) presents a quasi-documentary approach to a day in the life of a high school that just happens to culminate in a bloodbath.

This approach doesn't result in anything prosaic or overtly preachy, however, and Van Sant's direction is a brilliant example of how to establish a sense of milieu and community with subtlety and brevity. Use of long, slow tracking shots; a cast of unknowns and multiple points of view gives you a real feel for the school building and a genuine flavour of the personalities there, which cleverly adds to the tension as we await the terrible denouement.

The naturalistic feel of the film is very reminiscent of Larry Clark's movies, minus the nudity, but complete with the lingering camerawork and occasional and uncharacteristic lapses into sledgehammer morality (eg. the scene which follows three girls from the cafeteria to the toilet where they all proceed to throw up their food in unison). On the whole, though, DeSant does his best work since Drugstore Cowboy in fitting all the jigsaw pieces into place, even if the big picture is necessarily inconclusive.

So what does make a student go home, play Beethoven, order some guns, screw his best friend in the shower and return to college with mass murder on his mind? In truth, we're not really any nearer to knowing after the movie finishes. If you can bully 1,000 people and only one turns homicidal, what lesson should we learn: to not bully people, or that we can get away with bullying up to 999 people without recourse?

But one thing seems clear: let your kid play Fur Elise on the piano at home incessantly, and you're just asking for trouble. Dead Kenny knows, don't argue!