Less deft in the title department, Tim Sutton’s enigmatic third feature, after Pavilion and Memphis, takes an equally oblique quasi-art-film approach to the mass shooting as Gus van Sant’s Elephant. Instead of directly dramatising the Aurora massacre at a Batman screening in 2012, on which the film is loosely based, Sutton observes six characters as they go about faintly ominous daily business leading up to the incident: a decompressing Iraq vet at a support group, a smoothie-pounding selfie queen, a disaffected artist in a Freddy Krueger sweater being quizzed by an unseen interviewer.
With fey indie laments wafting through these dispassionate vignettes, it feels like Austrian miserablist Ulrich Seidl has gone on American vacation. Occasionally too emblematic as individuals, the characters collectively mesh into a portrait of a dislocated society elevated by Sutton’s talent for disorienting imagery. Ennui and rage ionise the environment as much as the sentinel-like pylons he can’t keep his eyes off.
