The Dirties unfolds like a weight slowly sinking in your gut. Very early on we feel we know where its going, and yet we have to watch things progress with painful, inevitable slowness until we arrive at the destination we know weve been heading towards the entire time. The Dirties is presented as a found footage picture documenting two young, oft-bullied outcasts trying to make their own student film (a movie about making a movie, then) about the two of them hunting down and shooting all the bullies in their school. After the film receives a less than rousing reception in class, one of them has a different idea. You can probably guess what it is. There have been school shooting films before, but The Dirties approach, both in its found footage presentation and how it humanizes (or maybe sympathizes) with the perpetrators, is a new way to take on the subject. The predictability of its plot doesnt lessen the films impact; in fact, The Dirties wants us to watch every small step towards its ending. It is a movie designed to make us see, understand, and analyze those steps to see if we can rationalize the films conclusion. Though it is not always consistent (and maybe cuts some important corners), its aims are certainly noble. Certainly, there will be some who are uncomfortable with this approach. I was, at various times during the film, uncomfortable with the approach. At different moments in the film itself one may feel the filmmakers have gone too far, crossing over from humanizing their subjects to sympathizing with them (depending on who you are, this may or may not be a problem). And as admirable as it is to show how brutal bullying can be and what it can push people too, there are also equally serious questions about mental health that are brushed over too easily. There is also a mostly unresolved idea of how movies can influence (or perhaps, initiate) this kind of violence, but that too is left a bit too hazy to take a complete picture of it. And yet, despite the fact that the film doesnt always work the way it wants to, it is opening up the floor for a real discussion about some of the most traumatic events of our time. The most notable school shooting film thus far has been Gus Van Sants Elephant (2003), which took a restrained, formally-distant approach to its subject matter. The Dirties rejects that restraint and gets right into the minds and lives of the perpetrators to remind us that theyre real people, regardless of what theyre planning to do. Whether we feel thats right or wrong, it at least forces us to react, respond, and discuss. The Dirties is by no means the definitive picture on school shootings, their cause, or their meaning in modern society. But its ability to provoke us into seriously thinking about these terrible things from a different angle, no matter how uncomfortable, is not only effective, but important. That's enough to make it worth watching.