For someone so gloomily aware of his own privilege, Wilkerson spends a lot of the film playing dumb and speculating-a writer's trick for giving shape to a piece with a thesis and no conclusion.
When the repressed past gains sudden and violent visibility in the present, the genre that's evoked is horror, and one of the film's greatest strengths is the way it leans into this association.
[Travis] Wilkerson has a really keen eye. Not many people wanted to talk, so oftentimes the camera is artfully focused on an imposing tree or a dilapidated building.
It's hard to shake the idea that the 'live documentary' approach isn't a little more satisfying for this material, but it's impossible to deny the power of much of what's on display here.
Wilkerson's ruminative documentary brings home the filmmaker's preoccupation with the confluence of individual and institutional violence in an exceptionally personal manner.
Makes fitful attempts to contextualize the shooting within the broader murderous history of American racism, but ultimately is far more interested in expunging the director's own sense of inherited taint.
"Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" is a passionately political film, aflame with rage in spite of its director's measured, ruminative tone of voice. It is also a horror movie, full of specters and silences and a terror that is pervasive ...
In directly requesting the audience's trust, Travis Wilkerson initiates a not-particularly-inviting proposition for the viewer, and specifically the white American viewer.
