BEAUTIFUL BOY: a sadly empty response to a terrible tragedy

BEAUTIFUL BOY is a story ripped from today's headlines yet rarely told.
With the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres very firmly in mind director Shawn Ku examines the aftermath of a mass shooting at a US university from the point of view of the devastated parents of the teenage shooter.

Bill (Michael Sheen) and Kate (Maria Bello) start to fear the worst after they hear of the shooting and can't get hold of their son Sammy on the phone. When police arrive at their front door they're already braced for bad news but nothing can prepare them for being told that Sammy is the one responsible for the murder of 17 classmates and professors.   
Within hours the press are camped out on their front lawn and the couple are forced to flee their home and take refuge with Kate's brother and his wife. What follows is a faux fly-on-the-wall style study of a couple trying and failing to come to terms with the enormity of the death of their only son and his inexplicable slaughter of so many innocent people. It's a process made more complicated by the fact that Bill and Kate are a couple on the verge of separation. Physically they're together but emotionally there's an enormous gulf between them and it's only been made wider by this terrible event.
What I found so unfortunate about BEAUTIFUL BOY is that the coldness and distance between Bill and Kate spilled over into my response to them. The film has a chilly, clinical look and feel that evokes only emotional numbness. There was no sense of sharing in the horror of Sammy's actions, or his parents inability to find the appropriate reaction. Both of them went from moments of steely resolve to complete collapse but the impression was of observing a clinical study. Ku's insistence on having his camera continually moving to mimic the motion of a hand-held camera objectively documenting events as they occur merely adds to this impression and may induce motion sickness in some viewers.
In a time when the media is quick to craft often simplistic explanations for horrific, complex and sometimes inexplicable events, and even quicker to apportion blame (often equally inaccurately) BEAUTIFUL BOY serves as a sombre reality check, reminding us that those closest to the perpetrator can be left just as devastated as the families of his victims, with the additional burden of guilt and confusion over what caused their loved one to go off the rails and whether they are somehow responsible.
Grim and understandably depressing as BEAUTIFUL BOY is, my ultimate response was only disappointment at its failure to move me.