All The Empty Rooms Review | Sedimenting Memories That Were Once Lived-in

It is a crude reality of our times that our ability to move on from a catastrophe is inversely proportional to our proximity to it. Each time there is a school shooting, the American media obsessively harps on the shooter: Who was he (we are saying “he” because statistically, 97% of the perpetrators are male)? Who were his parents? Did he go to church? Did he make eye contact? Did he sit with anyone during recess, or was he rather lonely?

The focus shifts immediately to the shooter, while the victims recede into statistics, occasional flowers on the grave and murals on a wall.

All the Empty Rooms by Joshua Seftel meditates on loss by resisting this very instinct of looking away and moving on. The Oscar-winning documentary short film, streaming on Netflix, follows journalist Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp, as they revisit the rooms of victims and meet their parents over seven years, for whom time has effectively stopped since the day their lives got upended. Moving through the bedrooms that are preserved like shrines, they attempt to trace the lives that once filled these spaces, piecing together fragments of presence from what remains. In a grief-saturated society that remains obstinately recalcitrant to loss, lingering in these bedrooms becomes a restless act of defiance.

The still photographs—of a hairbrush with strands of hair still tangled in it, a laundry basket filled with clothes left unwashed for years, hair ties looped around a doorknob, friendship bracelets, SpongeBob wallpaper and mud-caked Converse shoes no one will ever wear again—leave the viewer with a knackered heart. It becomes almost unimaginable that these children once woke up, had breakfast, cuddled their pets, said goodbye to their parents and took the bus to school, never to return.

It is harder still to grasp that the fear of anything-can-happen is the lived reality for the children who go to school and for the parents who send them away every day. It reminds one of the 2020 Oscar-winning animated short If Anything Happens I Love You– a film that takes its title from the last text a child sends to her parents before being shot.

The grieving parents find old family photographs, handwritten notes and videos of their child in their camera roll for Hartman and Bopp. In the videos, their child hugs a pet or screams “Go Dodgers!” for his favourite baseball team in a stadium full of supporters. They bring out their child’s favourite sour-candy plushie and an empty gumball machine. Bopp captures the child’s retainers, unused make-up bought by a teenager weeks before she went to high school, or the dress she was about to wear for the first school dance. Within a week, the child goes from preparing for prom to becoming the cause of a condolence gathering. Grief turns her absence into an axis around which her parents’ lives now revolve.

The father of nine-year-old Hallie Scruggs, who died in the Covenant School shooting of 2023 in Nashville, remembers her through the smallest sensory traces. He says he wants to feel her sweaty hair again and searches for her smell in the blanket because, as he puts it, “Sadness is a part of connecting with her.” Dominic Blackwell, who was killed in the mass shooting of 2019 at Saugus High School, California, is remembered by his mother in much the same way. She says she does not want to lose the smell of his room. It becomes evident that these rooms are the last things that still connect the parents to their children. They stand as a testament to lives unfairly, untimely, unnaturally lost.

Stepping into these rooms, how can one even begin to offer a word of consolation to the bereaved parents? Hartman and Bopp, for the most part, simply listen.

Hartman’s involvement with this project carries its own arc, as the documentary reveals. For years, as a correspondent for CBS News, it was his job to arrive at the site of a school shooting and offer words of comfort, to find a silver lining, “to restore people’s faith in humanity,” as he puts it. But he also admits, “What I have been doing is whitewashing the whole thing.”

With each harrowing massacre, Hartman observes that the nation takes less and less time to move on. Yet, moving on is a privilege he no longer allows himself. His ambition with this project is simple, yet profound: “I wish to transport all Americans to stand in one of those bedrooms for just a few minutes. We’d be a different America,” he says.

This documentary stems from the urge to bear witness to the aftermath of a crisis that remains unresolved to this day. As a result of a system that repeatedly fails them, some children will never get to grow up, go to college, or attend their homecoming dance. They will never get to put stickers on their assigned lockers. The rest are made to rehearse fear, subjected every few months to drills—lockdown, lockout, shelter-in-place—that have begun to feel like a grim, tripartite routine. It is almost unfathomable that guns are part of the mental landscape of children, each of whom seems to know of an incident that has either occurred at their own school or at another school in their district.

There is something deeply human about two fathers setting out on a journey to photograph rooms preserved by grieving parents. Bopp’s photographs are compiled into photobooks, which the duo then passes on to the families, sharing what they have observed. These photographs include shots of objects under the bed, footprints, and mud-stains—anything that testifies to a life that was welcomed, loved and valued. Fifteen-year-old Gracie Muehlberger’s father says, “As long as that room exists, she exists in a way.” Through their project, Hartman and Bopp provide her family with one more space where she continues to exist. They are acutely aware of the deeply vulnerable and intimate spaces they are being allowed in—all the empty rooms. Yet, these rooms are brimming with evidence of life. The evidence is here, so are the witnesses; only the life is gone.

“Where have all the flowers gone?” we ask—a rhetorical question, of course. We know where they are, how they disappeared, when we looked away. We know how far we are from preventing it from ever happening again.