Directed by Keith Maitland. Rating unavailable

Fifty years ago last summer, Charles Whitman took a high-powered rifle to the top of Austin’s University of Texas tower and shot 49 randomly selected people in roughly an hour and a half, killing 16 of them before being shot at close range by a brave sheriff’s deputy. (This was also the pre-SWAT-team era.)

The stomach-churning events of that horrible day are re-created by director Keith Maitland through survivor interviews, here given voice by unknown but excellent actors approximating the age of the students, police, and others at the time. These haunted recollections are illustrated by realistic, if still weirdly dreamlike, animation in the rotoscoped style of Waking Life, by fellow Austinite Richard Linklater.

The graphic-novel approach is hypnotic and incrementally disturbing, as this true-life horror story begins shading into an indictment of a culture that has since succumbed to the lure of mindless violence. Even seeing kindergartners machine-gunned to death is not quite enough to shake the national torpor. The Republican governor of Texas recently pushed through a law allowing concealed weapons on that same campus, institutionalizing the kind of fear triggered by Whitman, who is appropriately given almost no profile here. The implied intellectual chill is even more threatening.

Maitland’s outstanding Tower makes a few, Michael Moore–ian nods toward the dystopian carnival of weapons the U.S. has become since the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of endless conflicts since. “The chickens have come home to roost,” Malcolm X famously said of JFK’s assassination—not long before being shot to death himself. But the movie mostly sticks to the moment Americans became sitting ducks.