‘The Graduates’ Tells A New Kind Of Story About Gun Violence

Restraint and stillness can be hard to pull off in a story where something seismic has happened. But those qualities are central to director Hannah Peterson’s “The Graduates,” a coming-of-age drama that unfolds a year after a fictional school shooting.

A lesser film might drop viewers into heavy-handed flashbacks of the shooting and its immediate aftermath. But in “The Graduates,” the signs of what happened a year earlier quietly reveal themselves: metal detectors and bag checks at the school entrance. The remains of a memorial to the six teenagers who died. Students, teachers and parents walking on eggshells, not knowing exactly how to mention the unmentionable.

Peterson, who wrote, directed and edited the film, explained that the choice to only gesture at the shooting is “trusting the audience to be able to do the work to feel the gravity of those things,” she said in an interview. “Maybe it’s like just a moment passing, that you see a student walking through a metal detector. But there’s something lingering about that. There’s something that’s not quite normal about that.”

The film’s carefully wrought focus on what comes next was informed by conversations Peterson had with survivors of school shootings and their parents and teachers, and her intention to tell a different and more nuanced story about gun violence in America.

“When you think of a survivor of gun violence, we think of it in this really one-note way. We might think of the more explosive emotions that we pay attention to right after something happens,” she said. “Telling the story a year later, after the news cameras had left, was a part of the story that I hadn’t really seen, and I thought it was an opportunity to pay attention to the more subtle, more insidious ways that trauma and grief seep into our lives, and the lasting effects of these things.”

How do you keep on living after an unspeakable tragedy? “The Graduates” chronicles a trio of characters grappling with this question and struggling with survivor’s guilt. There’s high school senior Genevieve (Mina Sundwall), whose boyfriend Tyler died in the shooting; Genevieve and Tyler’s friend Ben (Alex Hibbert), who transferred schools but has now returned to graduate with his classmates; and Tyler’s father John (John Cho), who coaches the school’s basketball team, of which Tyler had been a member.

“This is the most interesting part of the story: how we go on and how we move forward,…