Dark Night

Taking its cue from the 2012 mass shooting in a Colorado cinema when a dozen people were killed at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, this ponderous, slow-burning drama fancies itself as an elliptical study of small-town disaffection, but frequently comes across as pretentious twaddle. The faux documentary style, with dialogue and incident kept to a bare minimum, follows six disparate townsfolk over a single day, their lives only intersecting at a fateful twilight visit to the local multiplex. Writer/director Tim Sutton stresses it's a work of fiction early on in a scene where a background TV reports on the actual events of Colorado, although the wordplay of the title walks an extremely thin line between subtle and crass. The film has its precedents, most notably Gus Van Sant's similarly-themed Elephant, but its attempts at social commentary are far too opaque and stuttering to hold the viewer's interest.