Netflix Film Review

Newtown, Connecticut is a small quiet, unassuming community which probably never hoped that it would find itself in the spotlight; unfortunately, on December 14th, 2012 that’s exactly what happened when a lone gunman visited the Sandy Hook Elementary School, taking 26 innocent lives. This was a truly tragic event that horrified the world and forever changed the lives of the people of this small close knit community.

The documentary Newtown is a window into this community and shows us how the people reacted to this tragedy and how they have strived to move on from it as best they can, while never forgetting those who were lost.

The film is extremely well put together and done so in a respectful and tasteful manner that while discussing the tragedy, does not seek to dwell on the horrors of it. The core of the film is how this community as has tried to come together and recover from this event.

To do this the film uses interviews with various members of the community including; teachers at the school, the medics who treated the wounded, the police who first arrived on the scene and the family members of survivors and victims’.

These interviews are moving to listen to with many expressing the initial feeling of shock to the events, one such instance that stuck in my mind came from the school’s custodian who recalls that when returning to work after the shooting he was working but confessing that mentally “I wasn’t there”, while tearfully recalling the smiling faces of the children that were lost.

The interviews with family members are often intercut with their home movie footage of their children, while they speak with pride of their children, and how they have tried to cope as parents with their loss. These moments are truly difficult to watch and I’m not ashamed to admit they did leave me fighting back tears. These small moments of the children at play and smiling only serve to drive home the true scale of the tragedy, to think that these vibrant young children with their whole lives ahead of them are longer with us, it’s truly heartbreaking.

The film wisely does not dwell on the gunman who perpetrated the shooting and sensibly does not name him either, briefly devoting a small section of about 5 minutes to people discussing his actions and his reclusive home life before the shooting, as well as the view of him in the eyes of survivors who are understandably reluctant to forgive his actions.

The film also focuses on the efforts of the families of victims to try and bring about some kind of political change to America’s gun laws, a process which has been attempted numerous times before and has always met with strong opposition from the very powerful pro-gun lobby. The film captures the frustration that the townsfolk feel when, yet again, the political process lets them down when they attempt to make gun laws just that little bit safer, just to prevent such an incident from happening again.

These moments made me as angry as I’m sure many felt following the shooting, mainly because the request of the families is not unreasonable. They simply to increase background checks on firearms and to prevent those with mental health issues from owning a gun so as to make guns safer, but they find that they simply can’t bring about this change due to the interests of incredibly powerful groups who always get their way, even if it seems to be against common sense.

The story of Newtown is a tragic one, but the film does attempt to show that the community is healing. It shows us that those who lost loved ones, as well as their friends and neighbours, are making great strides to use transform their loss into a motivation to do wonderful things, whether it be organising charity events in honour of their late children, bringing new children into the world, or in the case of one child, growing his hair long as a way of paying tribute to his late friend.

Newtown is a truly moving and respectful film that I highly recommend you watch. The film shows us how a community reacts and tries to move from a truly horrific event while continue to honour the fallen. I feel that perhaps most crucially that the film it shows that the violent actions of any individual or group will never succeed in tearing a community apart, in fact, it only served to bring them closer together.