Movie Review: Run Hide Fight

Zoe (Isabel May) is somewhat of an unusual high schooler, in that she’s comfortable handling guns because her father has taught her how to hunt. (Although, such teens who have been introduced into a healthy gun culture are more common than some think.)

But something’s gone wrong with Zoe emotionally. As one teacher flat-out tells her to her face, she used to be outgoing and cheerful. Now she’s withdrawn and become flippant with her teachers. She even tells the only friend she has left, “This is high school. Nothing that happens here matters in the real world.”

So on senior prank day, she’s not impressed by the hijinks that go on. But when a van crashes into the cafeteria and students dressed in black cold-bloodedly shoot a number of other students, everything changes.

Covered in blood, Zoe manages to escape the school. But then she slows to a stop. Will she turn around to warn other students to run? Will she fight? 

Run Hide Fight is quite the unusual movie. It shows in gritty detail what a prolonged school shooting looks like, without being exploitational. If you make a comment on this, please don’t mention politics. Some reviewers think they see partisan politics in this movie, but the politics is in their heads.

Everything rests on Isabel May’s shoulders, and she does carry the movie. It pretty much zips along from start to finish. She does not play Zoe (which means “life”) as an over-the-top action hero. She is actually terrified during much of the movie. And Zoe has to work out her emotional problems during the course of all the violence.

Isabel May is twenty, so she was nineteen or twenty when she played the seventeen-year-old. She mentioned in an interview that fear of a school shooting was a real part of her life.

Is Run Hide Fight a great movie? It has a few continuity problems, and a few of the scenes seem forced. But it is well worth watching, and I am not aware of any other movie like this out there.

(If you don’t want to see several students get shot to death, and if you can’t stand the sight of blood, this movie is not for you.)

As a little social commentary, I have been shown more than once the standard workplace video that shows the options of run, hide, or fight in an active shooter situation, and the pragmatic explanations of when to use which option. But schools are given only one option: hide. Schools lock down in an active shooter situation.

There was a situation at a school that won’t be mentioned here, in which students in a completely different building were locked down, instead of being allowed to flee. This makes no sense, especially since some shooters go from classroom to classroom. Certain administrators have decided this is the lowest-risk option in terms of insurance and public image and their own careers, but the students’ lives are not given the highest priority.

I feel sorry for teachers who are stuck in this system. If they go against administration policy and have their students flee, they could be sued if a student gets injured. It wouldn’t have to be something as dramatic as a student getting shot. If a student breaks an ankle while fleeing, the teacher could be in big trouble.

Those videos that businesses use to show their employees to run, hide, or fight should be remade featuring teenagers and shown to high schools. It gets trickier with ages younger than that, but the blind insistence on a one-size-fits-all policy is an act of cowardice that does not serve students well.