Spoiler alert: It is nearly impossible to talk of this film without mentioning important plot points that may constitute spoilers. If you have not seen the film, you are warned.

When director Chen Shi-Zheng asked screenwriter Billy Shebar to work on the script for this film, he wanted him to start with two premises: there is no villain, and the murderer is not insane. Those are pretty challenging suggestions for a film that deals with a school shooting. Yet in working within those strictures Dark Matter brings a deeper examination of the kinds of events that shatter the world from time to time.

Liu Xing is an exceptionally bright grad student who has come from China to work on his Ph.D. He is accepted into an exciting cosmology project under his adviser, Dr. Reiser. He is truly a stranger in a strange land. The language and customs are foreign to him. He knows nothing of university politics. He believes that if he works hard he'll be rewarded. The problem is that his ideas—seemingly brilliant ideas—focus on dark matter and conflict with Reiser's theories, and Reiser is not willing to be upstaged by Liu. While Reiser is always genial, it is evident he doesn't really want to be challenged. He's perfectly willing to have his cadre of Chinese students working to make his project turn out right, but it has to be he who gets any credit.

Liu is also befriended by Joanna Silver, a Sinophile who takes special interest in Chinese students. She genuinely likes Liu and is in her own way another mentor—one who is kind, generous and accepting.

Chen brings his own immigrant experience to this story. Not long after he came to the United States, a Chinese student went on a shooting rampage. Chen is not interested in justifying or condemning the act, but rather is looking at all the forces that come into play for such an event to take place. Dark matter works well as a metaphor for these forces. Dark matter is a hypothetical kind of matter that is not detectable, but is inferred by gravitational effects. (I don't really understand it, but that doesn't have a bearing on viewing the film.) Liu contends that dark matter could explain away some of the flaws in Reiser's project—unseen, unprovable forces that are there none the less.

There are lots of bits of dark matter floating around Liu's life. We notice it in the letters he writes home in which he tells his parents he will bring honor to the family. It is in the conversations Liu has with the other Chinese students who also have difficulty understanding the strange ways of America. These cultural understandings and misunderstandings are subtle pressures against which Liu fights without even knowing he is in conflict. The pride that drives Reiser to deny Liu credit for his work is also a bit of an unseen force. The frustrations of the academic politics are yet another force working against Liu. Yet even though he is unaware of the forces, they are evident in the effects they cause. In time all these forces bring forth the dark matter that is within Liu.

As Chen wanted, there is no real villain in the story (although Reiser is an arrogant ass), nor do we see Liu as insane. When terrible things happen, we like to be able to put our finger on the one who is at fault. We want to define a villain or to write someone off as insane. But often those are merely easy answers that miss the complexity of the problem.

We all inhabit a universe that is filled with "dark matter"—forces that we may never sense, but which push us in various ways. We could simplify the problem by resorting to the idea of fate or of free will, but even those broad theories don't really explain the way life works itself out. Cosmology is a search to understand the vastness of the universe. Life is often cosmology in miniature—searching to understand our place within it all.