Saturday, April 1, 2023

The Fallout (2021)

IMDb plot summary: High schooler Vada navigates the emotional fallout she experiences in the wake of a school tragedy. Relationships with her family, friends and view of the world are forever altered.
Directed by Megan Park. Starring Jenna Ortega, Maddie Ziegler, and Niles Fitch.

The Fallout centers around a group of high school students who survived a school shooting by huddling together in one of the bathrooms, showing the ways they deal with that trauma in the following days. The student we follow most is played by Jenna Ortega, and she's absolutely incredible in this role. It's so hard to watch her try to hold things together any way she can but so easy to understand why she's acting the way she does. The other actors in smaller roles are also beautifully cast and directed, showing all the different ways this kind of traumatic experience can manifest in people. It's one of those slow-growing films where all of a sudden I find myself tearing up -- in this case, it was at the scene where she goes hiking with her father and the two of them are finally able to open up about their fears. This story, sadly, only gets more and more relevant with each week as the tide of American mass shootings goes unchecked, and movies like this that show the effect it can have on our kids will continue to be necessary.

How it entered my Flickchart:
The Fallout > Bad Education
The Fallout > Elf
The Fallout > Six Degrees of Separation
The Fallout < Deathtrap
The Fallout < Before Sunset
The Fallout < Boyz 'N the Hood
The Fallout < The Devil's Backbone
The Fallout > Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
The Fallout < La Strada
The Fallout < Knives Out
The Fallout > Marriage Story
The Fallout > Village of the Damned
Final spot: #454 out of 3780, or 88%.

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