Polytechnique (2009)

Based on the Ècole Polytechnique massacre that took place on December 6, 1989 in Montreal, Polytechnique documents the horrifying tragedy in which a gunman who claimed to be "fighting feminism" murdered 14 young women & wounded several others before turning the gun on himself and is shown from the perspectives of three people; the killer, one of his wounded victims & the victim's friend.

Excellently directed by Dennis Villeneuve (director of Incendies & Prisoners) plus exquisitely captured in black n white, the film grabs the viewers' attention from its opening moment & is told in a manner that only pulls them in, in spite of its dark story. Running at only 77 minutes, it not only recreates the dreadful event but also covers the aftermath of the three main people involved in the story.

The three characters we are introduced too are nicely presented on the screen by their respective actors, each delivering a very fine performance. However, the back-n-forth jump this film takes from time to time turned out to be quite distracting from the main subject. As for its faithfulness with the historical account, the film covers the gunman's killing spree with stunning accuracy.

On an overall scale, Polytechnique is a hard-hitting docudrama that neither tries to make a statement nor offers any kind of redemption but simply offers an insight of what happened on December 6, 1989. It presents a man who lost his way in life & blamed women for all his miseries and yet never really judges him for the judgment part is left to viewers themselves & in that aspect, it's sure to divide its audience.

An unsettling, tense & haunting recount which once experienced won't be easily forgotten, Polytechnique is a daring work of filmmaking crafted in memory of those 14 young women who lost their lives & few who survived but were scarred for life only because of the extreme misogynistic view of an individual who went completely crazy and the film as a whole subtly exhibits just how much hatred there can be in this world. Thoroughly recommended.

Fmovies: This Canadian movie is really some different approach on a school massacre movie, made by someone who obviously had a lot to say. It's shockingly grim and brutal, yet made with artful eyes and a close look to details, made by a future film genius.

We're immediately drawn into the story, which tells about the horrific shootings at the technical high school in French speaking Montreal in Canada in December 1989. We meet both the shooter and the victims in a film which makes an everyday event like school is, to be a nightmare. The shooter was a young man which have lost his way in life, the meaning of it all, blaming women's liberation, and women in general. It was a great shock to the peaceful Canadian nation, giving the country a shell shock. A true depicted tragedy, here recreated with a horrific feel of the reality in it.

The film has lots of film references. It's filmed in a Hitchcockian style. Some scenes and sounds are even inspired by Psycho. The film is made in black and white, which adds to this feel. The film would have been unnecessary gory if the blood had been red. It's in many ways very similar to Gus Van Sant's Elephant Camera moments are excellent. Angles are eventfully made and at times astonishingly beautiful, adding to the artistic feel. Music is scarce, ambient and adding to the feel. Both things makes us remember this film. The walking in corridors of the school is also quite similar. I also found similarities in the film language with the Swedish "LÃ¥t den rette komma in" (Let the right one in). Wonderful and great acted by the main role here. He is terrifyingly without any reason to carry on his life.

Not longer than necessary, which today is a blessing, when we see long movies dragging the story out. A well made film, which forces you to reflect on the event, and others like it. Kudos to the involved. Watch out for director Villeneuve, which gas already made some great stuff. He's gonna make a real important movie in the near future. Actually he right now has got his two latest films, 2011 Oscar nominated "Incendies" and the fresh smash hit "Prisoners", both with 8,2 rating here on IMDb. What a film maker!

This is an incredibly disturbing fictionalized account of the 1989 massacre. None of the characters in the movie are real people, except maybe the killer, Mark Lepine, but the movie probably doesn't want you to think of the killer as him either.

The movie is disturbing. That's fitting because who would have predicted such an incident back then when school and university shootings were hardly the norm? This was the largest mass-killing at a school or university at the time. What made this incident even more disturbing was that the killer had a sexist agenda. He killed 12 women and no men.

The movie give focus to the killer, a male classmate of the female students at Polytechnique as well as some of the female students. The killer is shown as disturbed man who at the beginning tries to kill himself, gives up, then visits his mother, before going on his rampage. He's calm and focused as he walks around the halls shooting women. Apparently this is how it really happened according to interviews.

The movie also shows a male classmate who has female friends in the classroom where the killer originally starts the massacre. The incident obviously affected women gravely but I'm glad it showed men as well. This character was intended to show that not all men are as brutal and insane as the killer (obviously). But it also shows his pain in survival and how helpless he felt being separated from the women. There's always survival guilt in school shootings but there was obviously a lot of survival guilt for the men here. That's shown, I'm glad it was.

The incident is also shown again from the women's perspective. It's plain disturbing. I don't think the movie ever crosses the line into sensationalism. The whole movie is in black and white which makes it more like video surveillance footage from 1989. It also tones down the more graphic parts of the movie where there's blood.

The movie isn't for the faint of heart. I think it is a story which should be told even 20 years after the original incident. I was 9 when the incident happened and I don't remember much besides the white ribbons on the anniversary and I didn't even know what it was about really except that women were killed in Montreal. I think that people who were kids when this happened or born after it should watch it to know what happened.

The movie also begins by showing how tough it was for women engineers in 1989. I'm sure it's still difficult, probably less than it was in 1989, but still difficult nonetheless.

The film doesn't try to understand the incident or why the killer murdered 14 women. It's kind of like Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" that way (a movie about the Columbine massacre). As long as there's deeply disturbed individuals who aren't getting help and lots of cheap guns and ammunition, incidents like this will persist. Changes have been made since 1989 and despite there being shootings like the one at Dawson college, I think progress has been made.

December 6th is officially National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. A white ribbon campaign was started by men in 1991.

Polytechnique fmovies. I wasn't terribly impressed by this movie, in fact at times I found it rather boring, especially the last 20 minutes which felt a bit pointless.

The first 40 minutes were alright though, even though I have no idea what the point was in filming it all in black & white (didn't know it was gonna be and the poster is slightly misleading as that is indeed in colour) it's set in 1987 after all not 1957, but I'm sure many think that that was a brilliant idea.

Anyway, lack of colours aside, yeah I wasn't terribly impressed with it, you don't get to know the characters much, or what made the killer actually snap (what made him hate feminists remains a mystery).

I mean I understand that maybe they didn't want to take too many liberties with the script, but maybe it would have worked better as a documentary instead. And then we'd get a little more insight as well.

The true story of which it's based is of course awful but that doesn't make the story anymore engaging, at least for me, certain others disagree and that's fine good for them.

I was put off by one of the very first things you see in this film, which is a statement in which the filmmakers hope to have their cake and eat it too. They claim it's "based on a true story" but they then disrespect the families by saying all characters have been fictionalized. It's the ultimate disrespect to profit (via cash or fame) on the misfortune of others, while not even telling their story. We all know that far fewer people would have chosen to see this movie if it was titled "Gately College" or something.

While I wasn't expecting a documentary, I was expecting something true to the facts. Now I'm left with the problem of figuring out whether anything in the film was true at all. Did we learn anything about the shooter? Did we learn anything about the victims? Did we learn anything about the responders? No.

Having said that, it did contain some of the most intense shooting scenes I've seen in a film, and for some reason I was also struck by the images of trees. But I was not impressed by the self-indulgent upside-down camera angles.

I think it probably is superior to Gus Van Sant's Elephant (Columbine) film, although it does follow in the same vein of being almost entirely devoid of content. If this is going to be the way that directors and writers depict traumatic mass murders, then they need to stop it.

On December 6, 1989, Marc Lepine wrapped his Ruger Mini-14 semi automatic rifle in a plastic garbage bag, filled the pockets of his coat with ammunition, and headed off to class at the Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, the engineering branch of the University of Montreal. By the time he was through, fourteen women lay dead, and another ten women and four men were in critical condition. Lepine culminated his misogynistic rampage and wretched existence with a bullet to his head, leaving behind a rambling three page letter railing against feminists who had turned society against him and ruined his life and everything good that had been created by man.

Even today the magnitude of the tragedy runs deep in Montreal's collective psyche, and its into this minefield that the film Polytechnique dares to tread, stirring strong sentiments from the public and critics alike for recounting an event whose wounds still live in the consciousness of victims families and survivors.

Filmed in stark black and white, and shot twice, once in French and again in English using the same cast, Director Denis Villeneuve imbues the film with an almost suffocating foreboding as a pallor of death hangs over the day like the snow that gently falls throughout. Rather than dwell on Lepine, he instead shifts the focus to two fictional students, Valérie (Karine Vanasse) and Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau), each bringing the perspective of their respective gender to the story.

By framing events through the lives of these two, Polytechnique packs a most powerful punch. With the exception of a bone chilling beginning, Lepine's murderous rampage virtually plays second fiddle to the story of Valérie and Jean-François, which is how Villeneuve wanted it. He studiously avoids dwelling on death, and shifts the film's emphasis to that of life, grappling with tragedy head on, and the aftermath of anguish that exploded that day like so many bullets from Lepine's gun.

This isn't some sensationalist gory ode to a mass murderer, but rather a memorial to the victims of that day. It's not that often you see that in a movie, which makes watching Polytechnique an act of remembrance, and a cause to reflect.