Zero Day

(Ben Coccio, 2003)

A Columbine-inspired film charting the activities of two teenagers over a period of several months as they plan an attack on their school that will culminate in joint suicide. Stylistically, Zero Day is identical to The Blair Witch Project insofar as the viewer is expected to interpret the film as though it’s an edited package, assembled after the fact by unknown agents from a larger stock of footage shot by the now-deceased characters. But the main advantage Zero Day has over Blair Witch is that there are no points at which the viewer is forced to ask “Why the hell are you still filming this?”. Since the intention to leave behind an explicit record of their activities is central to the declared agenda of the self-named “Army of Two”, the fact that they continue to film themselves is never a problem. (The issue is even played on by the script, which has several peripheral characters querying the fact that they’re being filmed—this is a trick that Blair Witch couldn’t have got away with, since that film relied on the viewer either not noticing, or willingly ignoring, the implausibility of sustaining the filming). Zero Day also goes one further than Blair Witch by switching its source of ‘footage’ near the end. Since the killers do not take their camera with them when they assault the school, the film shifts to CCTV footage (with sound cleverly provided by having one of the characters phone 911 and leave the line open). The quality of the acting in Zero Day is also much higher than that in Blair Witch, manifesting a dynamism and intimacy that is no doubt helped by the fact that the parents of the two main characters are played by the parents of the actors themselves. By the way, I really don’t mean to run Blair Witch into the ground, since it’s a film I like and which I thought worked well in its own right, but since its stylistic aims are so similar to those of Zero Day—and occur relatively infrequently elsewhere—I can’t help but draw comparisons such as these, especially since Zero Day deploys such elegant solutions to problems that Blair Witch was unable to avoid. There are also obvious comparisons (and contrasts) to be made between Zero Day and Elephant, which came out shortly afterwards in the same year. Whereas Elephant offers very little background on the killers, concentrating instead on delivering meditative glimpses into the lives of those affected by their actions, Zero Day displays the other side of the coin, focusing in on the lives of the killers themselves and revealing hardly anything about their school or victims. Notably, though, neither film goes out of its way to offer an explanatory analysis of the killers’ actions. And this is a large part of the reason why both films work, since it respects the fact that there are no easy answers.

Zero Day @ IMDb (UK)