On the morning of 4 December 2024, the Los Angeles artist Stanya Kahn opened X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, for her daily news digest and found it overwhelmed by reactions to the assassination of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. The mix of anger, celebration and vitriol astonished her, and she began collecting the posts. Almost two years on, that archive has become a 30-minute film, Deny, Defend, Depose, which presents the public response in chronological order, set to a soundtrack of acid and jungle music.

The title plays on the words scrawled on three shell casings recovered from the shooting, and on the strategy that large healthcare providers are accused of using to reduce payouts and increase profits. Kahn, a time-based media artist, describes the work as a record of how a single violent event was processed in public, post by post, as the story unfolded. She plans to keep updating the film as the legal saga continues.

The film is now screening at artist-run spaces, cinemas and galleries across the United States. The New York non-profit Participant Inc is showing it on 13 November, with a further screening at Slash Art in San Francisco on 12 December. Kahn had originally planned to release the film before 9 September, when Luigi Mangione's state trial in New York was due to begin. Mangione's guilty plea in August, an attempt to avoid double jeopardy, pushed the state hearing to 10 December, with a federal hearing to follow on 18 December, so the film remains a work in progress.

Kahn is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video whose work has been shown at the New Museum, MoMA PS1 and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her earlier feature Stand in the Stream, made over six years, wove together footage of her family with material drawn from online life.