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If there was a theme to today’s films, it was that you really don’t choose who you love. Or you do, and it’s just kind of inexplicable. Okay, maybe there was no theme.

Eagle vs Shark has been touted as New Zealand’s answer to Napoleon Dynamite, and I can kind of see where they’re coming from. You have the quirky characters, the curiously flat affect, but this has something else going on. In chronicling how wallflower Lily falls into and out of and back into love with perennial jerk Jarrod (imagine if Napoleon was just as geeky, but much more of a dick about it), writer/director Taika Waititi explores just how far love will go to find what’s salvagable about a guy you’d dismiss at first, second and fiftieth glance. Sweet, funny and, if the comparison must be made, a little bit deeper than Dynamite.

In a much more real-world application of love conquers all (or at least tries really, really hard to) we have the doc The Killer Within, in which a renowned environmental psychologist reveals to his family, friends and co-workers that he killed his college dorm mate in 1955. That January at Swathmore, with no warning, student Bob Bechtel took a rifle and killed fellow student Holmes Strozier as Strozier slept in what was meant to be the beginning of a killing spree that was to take out the entire dorm.

Instead, Bechtel fired two more shots at random, dropped the rifle and ran to his friend before confessing everything to the cops. Why he didn’t carry out his plan is only one of a dozen mysteries at the heart of this film. Why come forward now? He’d served his time (after being found mentally unfit for trial he was shipped off to a mental institution for five years before being set free). Why did the victim’s family forgive him? A note they sent to the judge was critical to his early release. If, as he claims, the killing was a Columbine-like response to being bullied, why does no one remember any such behaviour, in particular on the part of Strozier?

Your feelings about Bechtel will likely shift more than once during the course of the film, as his family grapples with the revelation. Though his wife knew after their third date, Amanda, her daughter from a previous marriage and Carrah, a daughter they had after they were married found out much, much later. It’s particularly sticky for Carrah, who wouldn’t exist if her father had been convicted and likely executed for his crime. To put it mildly, the film is a discussion starter.

Which is exactly what filmmaker Macky Alston intended, as he said at the Q&A after the film. Three Swarthmore alums, two of whom were actually there on the night of the shootings, stood up to attest to their version of events, stressing that they had no memory of bullying. Alston explained how he became involved in the film, as Carrah was a student where he was teaching and informed him of her father’s intention to out himself, inviting him to chronicle it. Carrah, by the way, was pro-death penalty until she heard about her father’s past.

Like I said, a discussion starter.