The Takeover: Two Wrongs, (Second Amendment) Rights, and a few Stages of Grief

Adrian Jules’ The Takeover pits one kind of villainy against another, and beneath this canopy devises a 13-minute psychological torture thriller about some of the ideas that torment the American psyche. It follows a father turned potential school shooter as he uses his second amendment rights to avenge his son’s suicide, or more truthfully, grieve it. 

The film gives you about half a minute to acquaint yourself with the students (Ashleigh Morghan, Blanca Isabella, and Andre Randle) and teacher (Maura Grace Athari) in the detention room before Bill Hunter (a convincingly unpleasant Luke Woodruff) bursts in with the principal (Jules), cocked gun in one hand, his sons’ journal in another. An odd android joke is squeezed in before the film has even begun to make sense of its conflict. The second joke drops within the first five minutes. The mix is imaginably as confusing for the hostages as it is for the viewer. 

The plot does not make it past the first lines of the journal which reveal an extramarital affair between Ms Brady and Principal Thompson. For the next few minutes, the hostages are subject to Bill’s twisted sermonising against infidelity—littered with racist, misogynist lines that the man is clearly enjoying the chance to use, perhaps one more than the other, which is also telling—as payback for allowing or participating in his son’s bullying. It is just about impossible to empathise with him beyond the initial fact. And because he gives his audience equally little scope to act, you can see them only as a group. The exception to this is Principal Thompson, singled out and brought to his knees on the foundations of a fairly irrelevant point. One begins to see the point the more Bill labours it, however. An eye for an eye: bullying in exchange for bullying. A better case against the silliness of the idea may not have been made recently. 

The background score keeps up the tense momentum of the situation while Bill carries on, handing back the same phones he confiscated, and to post on social media, no less. The climax of the nearly uniformly uptempo narrative is abrupt in keeping with the needs of wrapping up a complete plot within thirteen short minutes. Whatever Bill had hoped to do for his son is lost in his destructive translation, but his grief does make its presence felt. 

Watch The Takeover Short Film Trailer