I don't quite know what to make of Gus Van Sant's newest film, Elephant. The story of an average school day that ends in tragic violence, Elephant left me unsure of what it is exactly that Van Sant wants me to take away from the experience. What I ultimately feel, I suppose, is indifference – and, I suspect, that's exactly what Van Sant didn't intend. Elephant seems to be loosely based on the events of Columbine and literally follows several students around the halls of an unnamed high school during an average morning. We are introduced to them on a first-name only basis, learning very little about them along the way – certainly not enough to feel emotionally invested in their survival. We know that one boy has an alcoholic father, another is interested in photography, and a third is a popular jock with a gorgeous girlfriend. We meet a group of girls picking at their lunch before heading off together to the bathroom to purge, a gawky girl teased by others in the locker room, and a girl participating in a group discussing gays. We are introduced to one of the two young gunmen and discover he is a pretty average teen whose working parents are largely absent. We are witness to a scene in which he is pelted with spit-balls in class, we watch him practice the piano, we learn that he has a fascination with guns. Van Sant offers little in the way of explaining how this young man reaches the point of murdering his classmates in a cold-blooded and thoroughly calculated rampage. The violence that concludes the film is shocking, certainly, and disturbing to watch – but in a news at 11 sort of way and not because we feel like we just watched someone we know and care about lose their life.

       Van Sant has cast his film with unknowns, local high school kids with little or no experience. His intention was to give the film a realistic, documentary feel with much of the script improvised along the way. This leads to dialogue that feels, for the most part, forced and unnatural, the kind of self-conscious banter that comes from trying to pretend you don't have a camera trained on you. Fortunately, perhaps, dialogue is kept to a minimum - in large part, the film simply follows characters from point A to point B, with the camera peeling off to follow another character when their paths intersect.

       Elephant is a frightening film, but not in the horror sense. We know going in that something bad is going to befall these kids and the tension mounts when we see our two gunmen approach the school, warning one of our characters that some bad stuff is about to go down and he should stay out of the school. It is frightening in the sense that a seemingly normal teenage kid could harbor enough resentment to open fire on his schoolmates. It is scary to realize that a kid could order an assault rifle over the Internet and skip school to be home to sign for it when it arrives on his doorstep. It is chilling to hear two teenagers end a final run-through of their assault plan with the words 'Most importantly – have fun'.

       The DVD package is light on extras. Presented in your choice of full- or 1.85:1 wide-screen and Dolby digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1. 'On The Set Of The Film Elephant: Rolling Through Time' is a brief featurette offers a look behind the scenes and profiles of some of the teens featured in the film, along with insights from Van Sant. Other features are the theatrical trailer and a plug for HBO Films.

While it was probably never Van Sant's intention to explain the how's and the why's of incidents like Columbine, Elephant could have done more to help us understand the who's. I recall feeling a deep sense of sadness as details about the Columbine victims began to surface – understanding WHO those kids were and what they were about brought the tragedy home for me. Elephant is a visually interesting piece, but its structuring left me cold.