‘Eric LaRue’ Review: A Drama About the Aftermath of a School Shooting Shouldn’t Have This Much Indie Attitude and This Little Insight
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A school shooting is such a cataclysmic event that any attempt to dramatize the aftermath of one is, by definition, a film to take seriously.
That said, there’s a right way to make one of these. “Mass,” the 2021 Sundance drama in which four parents gathered in a church antechamber for a painfully cathartic encounter session (two of them were the parents of a victim; two were the parents of the shooter), was a movie that walked a delicate tightrope.
It was compact and graceful, harrowing and illuminating. “Eric LaRue,” directed by the actor Michael Shannon, is built around a similar situation, as it works its way toward a confrontation between the mother of a school shooter and the mothers of the three classmates he killed.
But instead of tackling the matter at hand, almost every scene is weighed down by a free-floating and at times annoyingly intrusive indie-film attitude.
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