Thoughts & Prayers

The film’s anger is muted but unmistakable. “Thoughts & Prayers” is about a nation that would rather teach children how to hide, how to bleed, how to die — than pass even the most modest gun reforms. It’s about an America that keeps choosing adaptation over prevention, ritual over change, and performative sorrow over meaningful protection.

In a crumbling empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem can’t hope to compete with the ghoulish impulse to profit from it, creating a new business sector might just be the only kind of healing that the richest country on Earth can afford.

Directed by Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock, it’s a sad black comedy, an Errol Morris sort of subject, shot in an Errol Morris sort of way — formal, neutral. The cinematography, by Jarred Alterman, is quite handsome and composed, amplifying the seriousness and eeriness, but also the banality and absurdity of the matter.