Stream It or Skip It?

Prior to making All the Empty Rooms (now on Netflix), longtime CBS News reporter Steve Hartman was known as the “feelgood happy news guy” whose human interest stories concluded news broadcasts on an upbeat note. He had long acknowledged school shootings with platitudes – they bring Americans together, etc. – but soon shifted to an independent project: visiting the homes of families who lost their children to these tragedies, with photographer Lou Bopp shooting stills of their bedrooms. Director Joshua Seftel, Academy Award nominee for the 2022 short Stranger at the Gate, followed the journalists to four homes, documenting the emotions of all parties in this 35-minute film. The result, of course, is heartbreaking.

The Gist: Dominic Blackwell, Hallie Scruggs and Jackie Cazares were all nine years old, and Gracie Muehlberger was 15. They were all killed by school shooters. Different school shooters, in different states. You’re likely not surprised by those facts, considering 132 school shootings happen in America annually. And Hartman had run out of words to apply to those stories. “I was repeating myself,” he narrates. So he changed his approach. He recruited Bopp to come with him as he visited grieving families, and document their loss in a new, more meaningful way. Bopp, who describes his skillset as “I photograph people, I shoot action,” shifted to still lifes for this project, because so many parents have maintained the rooms of their dead children just as they were the moment they were forever vacated. Moments, frozen in time.

Dominic’s parents didn’t wash their boy’s laundry – although they joke that they had to wash his socks and underwear, because “that’s just gross” – so they could keep his smell in his room; obvious from all the stuffies and posters and bric-a-brac in his room, Dominic loved SpongeBob SquarePants and football. One of Hallie’s three brothers tears up as he talks about her; her parents pull out a poster she made for school documenting the highlights of her life. Jackie loved animals – we see a video of her rolling in the yard and giggling as she’s sniffed and licked by dogs – and wanted to be a veterinarian; she decorated her room with rope lights that her parents haven’t turned off since she died. Gracie would prepare her outfits for every day of the week, and the one she would’ve worn if she hadn’t died still hangs on a rack six years later; she once wrote notes to her future self, and her father chokes up as he reads one aloud for the camera. 

After their visits, Hartman and Bopp return home to their families. Hartman’s young daughter paints his fingernails green. Bopp takes a photo of his teen daughter every morning. They put together personalized photo books for all the families they’ve visited. All they can do is shake their heads at the state of things, and appreciate their own loved ones while they’re together. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? HBO recently released Thoughts and Prayers, a feature documentary that takes a different angle on the topic, examining the “active shooter preparedness industry,” which markets stuff like bulletproof backpacks to students and gun-training courses for teachers.   

Performance Worth Watching: Love to the surviving families who agreed to put their names and faces in an internationally distributed documentary, surely hoping to make others like them feel less alone. 

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Hartman yearns for “a different America,” but sometimes it’s hard to find hope when you’re surrounded by such grief and suffering. The reporter doesn’t state his intentions for this project, but we can read into it: Perhaps preserving memories, acknowledging loss and simply remembering can be a means of coping — and perhaps a means of change. There are no political statements in All the Empty Rooms, no mention of the gun-control debate. The implication is, perhaps seeing the faces of traumatized parents and siblings, and the untouched shrines to lost children, might further inspire grassroots movements that have sprung up in the face of political inaction. Or maybe it’ll stop another person from picking up another rifle.

Although Hartman briefly acknowledges the media’s role in the scourge of school shootings – he mentions how too much focus is on the shooters rather than the victims – the film isn’t interested in broader issues. It’s hyperfocused on the pain and sorrow we feel when we see stuffed animals that won’t be played with, shoes that’ll never be worn, a tube of toothpaste that was never capped and never will be. Still lifes, but still deaths, too. Hartman sidesteps self-aggrandizement and -indulgence with simple shots of him at home with his family; he and Bopp and we all can be thankful at the same time we yearn, as Hartman states, for “a different America.”

Our Call: All the Empty Rooms is a difficult but powerful 35 minutes. Don’t be surprised if it earns an Oscar nod. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.