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The movie, directed by Charlie Minn, is unbearable to watch, yet its centering of first-person testimony — supplemented with floor plans of the building and phone footage from that day — makes the massacre immediate in a way that sometimes gets lost in news coverage or political debates. As you watch teacher Ernie Rospierski say he’s been avoiding thinking about could-haves and should-haves or hear descriptions of how precariously positioned student Maddy Wilford was after being shot, it’s impossible to avoid the sense that their survival came down to chance. These could easily be other shootings or other survivors.
In fact, Minn has also made documentaries (presumably with the same approach) on the Pulse nightclub and Las Vegas shootings, and at times this hasty, low-budget production gives off an unfortunate air of ambulance chasing. Music cues provide unnecessary goosing; cheap re-enactments trace the shooter’s whereabouts; and the director, who is sometimes on camera, intersperses good questions with manipulative prods to his grieving subjects.
But the subjects are there, and to the extent that “Parkland: Inside Building 12” is a memorial, not a documentary, it has a raw power.
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“Parkland: Inside Building 12”
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.