Run Amok is a Disney-style musical about a school shooting, with a soundtrack that includes Killing Me Softly, Bulletproof, and Hit Me Baby One More Time. Just writing that sentence feels absurd. It’s one of the most tone deaf and baffling concepts for a feature-length film I can think of, and while it gestures towards asking how we even got here as a society, the way it goes about starting that conversation is so wildly misjudged that it’s hard to understand how debut director NB Mager believed this would work. Simply put, it’s one of the most appallingly misguided films I have ever seen.

The film stars Alyssa Marvin as Meg, a geeky and, frankly, quite annoying teenage girl from a small American town whose mum, along with three pupils from her school, was shot and killed ten years ago. With a commemoration approaching, Meg decides to put on a performance that begins as a solo musical number before quickly turning into a scene-by-scene reenactment of the shooting itself. Her classmates, who initially react with discomfort and confusion, somehow flip almost immediately into being desperate to take part, volunteering to play the victims with barely any pushback.

What’s perhaps most shocking is that the idea of staging a performance about a school shooting isn’t even Run Amok’s biggest problem. The real issue is that the film is an absolute tonal mess from the very beginning. Instead of treating the subject with any sense of weight or restraint, the film plays like an indie coming-of-age comedy that repeatedly undercuts its own material. There’s a rehearsal montage, set to upbeat music, showing the cast laughing, joking, and enjoying themselves, which feels completely at odds with what the film is supposedly about.

It’s clear that Mager wants to say something profound about the ongoing reality of school shootings and the fact that nothing ever seems to change, but with just how poor the script is, it makes that impossible. Storylines are introduced and left unexplored, and the film makes the baffling decision to push the audience towards sympathy for the shooter by presenting him as a lonely, misunderstood kid. That choice feels like a huge slap in the face to the countless people affected by these crimes, and it’s hard to not find it deeply offensive.

There isn’t much in Run Amok that works, though Patrick Wilson largely escapes unscathed. The moments that land are the ones where he’s on screen, showing genuine emotion and a sense of understanding about the seriousness of the material. In contrast, much of the rest of the film feels oddly casual, as though everyone involved is far more interested in having a laugh than engaging with the reality of what they’re depicting.

In the end, Run Amok almost plays as an accidental portrait of how desensitised America has become to school shootings, to the point where they can be turned into entertainment without much thought, as long as guns themselves remain off-limits. This is a subject that absolutely needs to be talked about, and something that urgently needs to change, but Run Amok might be the worst possible way to try and do that.