Ghosts are notorious for getting stuck in time. Having lost track of the ongoing world, they will revisit certain hours as obsessively as they haunt a fatal spot. In Gus Van Sant's Elephant, the camera wanders like a ghost. It trails half a dozen teenagers through their Oregon high school, looping back repetitively to a few moments in their day--ordinary moments, you might think, which grow full and weighty only because they precede the kids' violent deaths.

Van Sant is not the first filmmaker to respond to the massacres at American high schools, in Colorado and elsewhere. He is the only one so far who has felt the need to linger over the texture of the kids' lives. Despite its power to devastate, his ghost story is full of vitality, precisely because normal time is coming to an end--but not yet, not until you've walked the halls with these young people and felt what they're about to give up.

Elias (Elias McConnell) spends his last hours doing what he loves: taking photographs, working in the school darkroom, chatting easily with everyone he meets. Michelle (Kristen Hicks) agonizes over the other girls' put-downs but finds refuge in the library, where she's welcomed as a volunteer. Carrie and Nathan (Carrie Finklea and Nathan Tyson), the high school's beautiful couple, get signed out early, having a serious affair to manage. John (John Robinson) just tries to make it through a day that's been messed up from the start by his dad (Timothy Bottoms), a middle-class drunk who needs John to take care of him. You meet other students, too, and a few adults--decent sorts, mostly--as the camera floats through the school, tracking now one character and now another. You also meet Alex and Eric (Alex Frost and Eric Deulen), the boys who stride across the lawn wearing camouflage fatigues and carrying heavy bags just as John walks through the door. "Get the fuck out of here and don't come back," Alex tells him--at which point, the movie itself goes back, returning to an earlier moment and another view of these events.

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