Comment on “Dark Night” movie — inspired by Aurora theater shooting — opened to praise, but should it even exist?

“Dark Night,” an art-house movie based loosely on the Aurora theater shooting, will debut this month in Colorado with plenty of acclaim but no consensus on the most important questions it raises about the attack that left 12 dead and more than 70 injured at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.” As the first major fictional work to address the nearly 5-year-old tragedy, “Dark Night” drew praise at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival for its intimate, nuanced character studies. But outside of critics, no one seems to agree on whether or not it exploits the tragedy for entertainment purposes, if it’s any good on its own terms, and last but not least, whether it should exist at all. “I was certainly concerned, going into it, about the level of the gravity the film would need and also the response it would create,” writer-director Tim Sutton said over the phone from New York.