Zero Day
What went through Dylan Klebold's and Eric Harris's heads in the months leading up to their assault on Columbine High School? ''Zero Day'' thinks it has the answer -- which is, in a nutshell, no answer -- and it may very well be onto something. But the film also has the misfortune to open locally after Gus Van Sant's ''Elephant,'' which is a maddening but sneakily transcendent treatment of the same subject. ''Elephant'' has all the poetry, while ''Zero Day'' has the blunt power of unsifted -- and manufactured -- data.
Still, it offers a vivid close-up of teen anomie gone homicidal. The conceit of Ben Coccio's debut feature is that it's made up of ''found footage'': The video ''diary'' kept by the killers is followed by the unblinking eye of the school cameras that record their carnage. Like ''The Blair Witch Project,'' ''Zero Day'' tries to turn no-budget liability into an asset by passing off cheapness as the real deal.
In that respect, the newer movie is the more honest success. We truly come to believe we're watching two kids define themselves as stars in their own little revenge thriller, filmed with the camera one of their dads gave them. Andre (Andre Keuck) is the poisonously articulate one of the pair; gangly, pimpled, and intelligent, he seethes with rage at ''the others.'' Cal (Calvin Robertson) is more conventional and more at ease with his peers; he's the follower who gets sucked into Andre's nihilism to the point where his friend Rachel (Rachel Benichak) worries about him turning into ''Andre #2.''
This sort of leader/accomplice calculus is familiar from the Leopold and Loeb case, among others, but what marks ''Zero Day'' as something different is the way it catches the artless drift of suburban adolescence. Andre and Cal decide to launch their killing spree on the first day the temperature drops to zero -- thus the title -- but, well, it's a warm winter and things don't pan out. (They reschedule for a more decisive date.) The two add to their arsenal by robbing a friend's gun cabinet, and the heist is a haphazard lark that only just succeeds. And so the die is cast.
''Zero Day'' takes pains to absolve friends and parents by presenting Andre and Cal as prideful secret keepers; the scene in which Andre's immigrant father chats him up with sweetly clueless advice that bounces right off the kid could give a chill to anyone with a teenager. Coccio also goes out of his way to dispel the media-brainwashing argument in a sequence in which the two gather up their CDs and videogames for a bonfire of the influences, ''so people won't blame them.''
That's a little pat, though, and so is Keuck's performance -- too scintillating in an actorly way, he's the least ''found'' object here. Andre gets off the big monologue toward the end, addressing the lens and telling his future audience that they ''made me what I am. . . . Make no mistake, we've been insulted.'' But, to Coccio's credit, we also see deluded vulnerability sneak in when the two claim they're ''just trying to show people what to value: respect and love your fellow man.''
That could be the start of a bad high school poem, the kind that gets quoted on one's own yearbook page. These two are armed and loaded, though, and ''Zero Day'' culminates in an inferno that tries desperately to avoid exploitation by using the smudgy, uninflected language of black-and-white hallway security cameras.
At 28, Coccio may be too young to understand that the very gimmickry of that conceit is what makes it exploitive. He's a talent of some sort, though. There are images in ''Zero Day'' that linger and gnaw, such as a tossed-off scene in which Andre and Cal drive down a nighttime street with their eyes closed. Without even trying, Coccio may have stumbled over the truest metaphor for Columbine yet.
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