The story of the whole movie is not complicated and can be roughly divided into three parts, school trivia, home planning and school shooting.
The records on the campus are simple but trivial, making the viewer feel no different from the campus experience they had or were around. A young boy who is a little rebellious but crying because of family chores and learning difficulties; a handsome boy who loves photography and is accustomed to recording his life on film; a small circle of girls who get together and discuss gossip about handsome boys on campus; bloated and forgotten A lonely girl working silently in the library. In one classroom, teachers and students are discussing how to identify gays on the street; in the playground, intense football training is going on. This is a modeled campus life, a time shared by students. The director uses a large number of long shots to deliberately create a slow campus rhythm, constantly accumulating the tension of the film. The hand-held technique makes viewers feel like they're part of a campus, but the monotonous flashbacks of campus life are drowsy. The young man in yellow, the photography enthusiast and the lonely girl pass by in the corridor. This is a key scene of the whole movie, and it is also a scene that the director spares no effort to render. Shooting from different angles of the three people, each of them appeared in this corridor for different reasons and different destinations, but the three of them met by accident and met with real certainty. The calm and simple campus life contains countless intersections. An unenthusiastic encounter reflects the closure in time and space. Since then, I suddenly realized that what the film conveys is not the listing of linear events, but the rendering of simple campus life from multiple angles. If life goes on at such a rhythm, there will be constant encounters and countless intersections. Even if there is jealousy among girls when they talk about boys, even if there are tears shed due to family chores, even if there is unpalatable food in the cafeteria, everything will continue to exist plainly. The encounter in the hallway is just a microcosm, extending the time, expanding the space, and adding more characters. If nothing changes, countless encounters will happen, which is the case of countless people's campus life.
However, is everything really like this? Undercurrents are surging under the stereotyped campus life. The movie arranges a different narrative outside of a shared point in time. The teenager Alex was thrown filth in class but had nowhere to complain. After he came to the cafeteria, he did not eat, but held a notebook to record. This is a stripped-down linear narrative, starting with Alex's helpless expression in front of the mirror, and things are slowly developing towards tragedy. In Alex's house, violent computer games, Nazi documentaries on TV, and distorted pictures on the walls all represent darkness and depression. In the sound of Alex's piano, "For Alice" is soothing and gentle, but it ends with a fast rhythm of irritability and anxiety. Perhaps this also hints at the overall rhythm of the film. Afterwards, the duo bought guns and planned to carry out the school massacre. The climax of the whole film came, and the peace of the campus was instantly shattered. The characters who appeared before were killed one by one, and even his partner Eric was also killed by Alex.
At the end of the film, Alex pointed at the couple, talking to himself, and the camera slowly moved away until the end. Ending with such an ending, the director left people to think more. As the director said, he didn't want to explain the events too much. In the film, he neither conducts a moral trial of the murderer nor shows sympathy for the victim, nor does he intend to fully analyze the reasons for the violence. Before the murder, the murderers just calmly said "have fun". Judging from the title of the movie "The Elephant", the elephant means the hard-to-find danger around you. How to detect and eliminate danger is a matter of opinion for the audience. Some saw gun control, some brought up schooling, and some discovered negative culture. However, the danger is still there, in the peaceful campus and in the stylized life. Perhaps, you are walking on a familiar campus road, and there is a cold rifle pointed at you in the corner next to you. This person met you the day before yesterday, met you yesterday, and today, he will make you unable to see tomorrow.
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