Shared Darkness

I’d mentioned Ben Coccio’s Zero Day a while back, when reviewing the rampaging-young-lovers flick Jimmy and Judy, and happened to stumble across an old DVD review of the movie for Now Playing Magazine a shady outlet that left a trail of unpaid debts in its wake, so I figured I’d re-post it now — “just because,” as Perry Farrell might say. Of course, now this creates a whole new set of reviews of like-minded flicks I need to dig up and post. C’est la vie. To wit, slightly redacted from its original publication in April of 2005:

In the wake of the Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in April of 1999 — the last and worst in a string of coolly plotted adolescent murders that captured the nation’s attention over the course of about 18 months — a number of movies, not coincidentally all staunchly independent productions, have delved into teenage isolation and violence, from Paul F. Ryan’s Home Room to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and to some degree Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen. Add Ben Coccio’s film debut, Zero Day, to this estimable list.

None of these movies laid siege to the theatrical box office (Zero Day didn’t even sniff commercial release), but that’s not an indictment of their quality, collectively or individually. Quite to the contrary, these movies are unnerving — perhaps none more so than Zero Day — because of their casual misanthropy or disaffection. They tell you that it’s not about one person who brutally antagonizes them like a bully from a 1980s teen comedy, it’s not about one event that made snap. They tell you the truth, in other words. It’s about the collective weight of teenagedom.

Zero Day takes as its two protagonists Andre (Andre Kreuk) and Cal (Calvin Robertson) and, much more than even Elephant, models its narrative around Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the real-life shooters from Columbine. Conceived as a random pastiche of self-recorded video diary moments meant to be locked in a safety deposit box before their ominous “big-ass mission,” the film tells the story leading up to the boys’ riddling their high school with bullets in their own words. This means it is by turns petulant, flippant, taciturn and well-expressed. (The biggest departure from details released from the Columbine investigation finds Andre and Cal leaving their schedule up to the weather — they will launch their attack, they decide, on the first day the temperature dips below zero degrees.) The movie’s strength lies in its young (non)-actors’ preternatural calmness and confidence. Coccio, too, establishes a laudable intimacy with his handheld camera; some of the film is shot by Kreuk and Robertson, but the bonus materials make clear his shaping influence in its look and feel.

Speaking of which, DVD extras here are considerable, anchored by an amusing making-of featurette that mostly consists of extraneous material and Coccio’s on-the-fly directions to his charges. While this would have the potential to be irritating and masturbatory for many films, with Zero Day it offers a telling glimpse at the collaborative process and cozy, informal attitude on the set. A storyboard gallery and screen tests for both Robertson and Kreuk show how well plotted out some of the seemingly improvised moments of the movie are, and Coccio and Kreuk share a genial audio commentary track. Rounding things out are a liner note essay by film professor Henry Jenkins and an additional photo gallery from the film’s festival run. A more structured interview with Coccio would have been interesting, but perhaps reductive. After all, adult bafflement at the intuitive bonds on display in this worthy rental is I guess part of the point. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)