‘Run Amok’ review: A student plans a musical about a school shooting in audacious, uneven US debut

Dir/scr: NB Mager. US. 2025. 103mins

The dark comedy Run Amok feels as if it could have been made by its protagonist, an ambitious teenager trying to process her mother’s death in a school shooting by creating an emotionally barbed musical that constantly threatens to derail. Writer-director NB Mager’s audacious, uneven feature debut, which is based on the filmmaker’s 2023 short of the same name, stumbles more than it shines, but that is not from a lack of compelling ideas about America’s gun crisis and the foolish paths adults pursue in the name of keeping children safe.

The film may have flaws, but Mager hits a nerve

Premiering in Sundance’s US Dramatic Competition, the picture joins a rapidly growing list of films about school shootings, with recent entries including the 2021 Sundance entry Mass. Run Amok differs from those previous films by mixing the expected raw emotions with a satirical streak, wielding humour to illustrate how those who have survived tragedy can react in unpredictable, even funny ways. The film’s timeliness is undeniable, although some audiences will want to avoid such sad subject matter – no matter Mager’s unconventional spin.

Nerdy but sweet freshman Meg (newcomer Alyssa Marvin, who also starred in the short) learns that her high school will be organising a commemoration for the 10th anniversary of a fatal shooting that occurred on campus, in which a student killed three classmates and a teacher. This news is personal for Meg, whose mother was that teacher. With the encouragement of her music teacher, Mr. Shelby (Patrick Wilson), Meg, an accomplished harpist, decides to write a musical about that day, recruiting her confident older cousin Penny (Sophia Torres) to be the lead as she has an amazing singing voice.

Meg quickly encounters obstacles — the first being her disapproving principal Linda (Margaret Cho), who wants this commemoration to be uplifting, not dour. Linda’s idea of an inspirational musical performance is ’Amazing Grace’, so Meg lies and assures her that the song will be included. (As part of Meg’s subterfuge, she calls her show Amazing Grace: The Musical.) But this freshman intends to do something honest and even combative, designing the piece around the six minutes it took the murderer to complete his killings before he himself was shot dead. To further shock her audience, Meg incorporates orchestral versions of songs such as ‘…Baby One More Time’ and ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’ into the programme.

Run Amok follows a familiar let’s-put-on-a-show narrative as Meg, Penny and a few classmates take on this possibly foolhardy task. Mr. Shelby supports Meg’s vision, insisting that these students need to express their fears about living in a country riddled with school shootings, but he soon gets distracted by other matters and so Mef is mostly left to her own devices.

The film is comedically haphazard — the excerpts we see from Meg’s proposed musical are never so woefully amateurish that they become hilarious — and some of the film’s younger actors are too broad or unpolished. But then Mager will seize upon a moment so painfully candid that it perfectly articulates the anxiety that American children now live with as they endure endless active shooter drills. In one superb set piece, Meg walks her cast through the hallway where the shooting took place, having different classmates play the victims and the shooter. The reenactment contains such horror that it places Run Amok’s more strained sequences in higher relief.

Mager’s plotting often feels contrived, the filmmaker forcing her characters to behave in certain ways to produce desired emotional results. The most notable of these is the surprising, but not entirely convincing arc the seemingly lovable Mr. Shelby undergoes. He has long been celebrated as a hero because he helped stop the shooter, and was seriously injured in the process but, with the 10th anniversary on the horizon, he starts to become more aggressive in his belief that children need to be protected. While the resulting, intentionally outrageous twist is farfetched, Mager’s underlying point stings, suggesting that teachers and parents can end up doing more harm than good in the name of safety.

Marvin portrays Meg as a sensitive, uncool teen who has grown up without a mother, living with Penny’s parents (Yul Vasquez, Molly Ringwald) but feeling like she doesn’t have a home. Meg was actually at the school on the day of the fateful shooting, and Marvin lets her character’s occasional angry outbursts convey her bottled-up anguish in all its inelegant urgency. Befitting its title, Run Amok is too unfocused to fully come together as satire or commentary, and yet the picture seems an appropriately messy response to an American problem with no solution in sight. The film may have considerable flaws, but Mager hits a nerve.