The Fallout is a surprisingly restrained drama about the aftermath of a school shooting
A strong handle on tone makes Megan Park’s debut a January sleeper gem
Film Reviews The Fallout
Some achieve teen angst, and some have teen angst thrust upon them. In less-fortunate cases, a pivotal trauma can jump-start a young person’s maturation by challenging their base assumptions about a world no longer handling their innocence with kid gloves. Holden Caulfield turned bitter upon losing his brother. Lindsay Weir dabbled in atheism after her grandmother announced that she saw nothing in her final moments. And in The Fallout, Canadian actor Megan Park’s well-measured first feature as a writer and director, a school shooting triggers a model student’s rebellious phase.
Well-meaning zoomer Vada (Jenna Ortega, going places) has kept her head down and nose to the grindstone all her life, her idea of bad behavior limited to risking tardiness for some Starbucks before class. But when the notion that we could go at any moment transforms from an abstract to a horrifying reality, she’s moved to reassess her priorities. If every day might be your last, who would use it to memorize cell organelle functions?
We experience the semiautomatic rampage as she does, trapped in a bathroom stall for a few unbearable minutes near the top of the film. Through sheer chance, she shares her hiding spot with lower-tier TikTok star Mia (Dance Moms alumna and Sia affiliate Maddie Ziegler) and the sensitive Quinton (Niles Fitch). Aside from a general disapproval of the frequency with which this nightmare plays out in reality, Park keeps the politics to a dull rumble in the distance. She’s more invested in these kids’ personal, imperfect pathways forward through a thicket of grief.
There is a human toll beyond the death count, she submits, in how survivors reassess their lives and struggle to recognize themselves during the intimate hell of the aftermath. The Fallout makes this point without histrionics, speaking through little details of character while confining the maudlin stuff to a pair of scenes near the end. “I’m a chill, low-key kind of person,” Vada tells the therapist (Shailene Woodley) her parents have requested she sees. The movie is low-key, too—a winning approach to such delicate subject matter.
With a firm handle on tone, Park skirts the pitfalls of bad taste one might expect from a film that uses mass violence as a narrative device for a coming-of-age plot. In the first sign of her restraint, she gives the carnage a wide berth by leaving it as unseen noise, without the faintest whiff of the morbid fascination that still haunts the reputation of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. She conveys the intense pain that’s left Vada numb through gestures closer to the banality and ritual humiliation of high school. On her first day back, Vada can’t bring herself to return to the lavatory without an anxious panic, and must hastily chart an escape route after pissing herself. Getting high on ecstasy between periods moves her to gnaw on a pen until it explodes in her mouth. Park understands that agony doesn’t preclude comedy, but rather accentuates the absurdity Vada’s never noticed before.
The core of the film is Vada’s gravitation toward Mia despite their differing social strata, as they form a bond over their shared tragedy. “Popular hottie and bookworm learn to see each other as more than stereotypes” could’ve been dreadful stuff, but Park’s credible, unforced dialogue enriches the afternoons these girls share. (There’s no overstating the benefit teen films reap by accepting an R rating, allowing their characters to talk like kids actually talk today.) Unfortunately, the naturalism of Ortega and Ziegler’s performances does have the adverse effect of accentuating the phonier bits of drama, like Vada’s literal screaming into the void with Dad (John Ortiz) or her tension with the gay BFF (Will Ropp) restyling himself as a David Hogg type in the wake of tragedy. The twerpy li’l sister (Lumi Pollack) seems to have wandered in here from another, broader script.
Even so, it’s a shame that The Fallout has received a little-promoted streaming run in the dead days of January. Park’s got chops, and her work shows that off without drawing too much attention to them. She knows how to assemble and hold a wide shot, and use creative editing to condense visual information. (Eliding the funerals and instead piling up shots of In Memoriam cards in a small box is one such stroke of inspiration.) Moreover, she’s got something to say about Gen Z, a wave of adolescents staving off the nihilism they have every reason to adopt. On a dying planet, risking life and limb every time they walk into homeroom, they can find refuge only in each other.
19 Comments
You know what was good? The Fall
risking life and limb every time they walk into homeroom
Homicides have ticked up, but my understanding is that they’re still well below their early 90s peak. And it’s also my understanding that kids are much safer in school than out of it (although suicides do go up during the school year and dip during summer vacation, with the recent remote learning era being the exception that proves the rule).
Yeah, we’re all very concerned about the toll that constant fear will have on kids’ development, so we’re helping them by -checks notes- scaring them shitless
That doesn’t make active shooter drills and threats any less terrifying for students. The first active shooter drill I witnessed was eye opening.
I think that begs the question of whether the drills are worth doing. We don’t, for example, generally train students what to do if a classmate has a severe allergic attack or begins choking on food, though both are surely more likely. In terms of the positive benefits of active shooter drills, we could likely achieve much of the same result by training teachers what to do outside of the presence of students, especially since a big part of the advice to students is going to be, “Do what your teacher tells you.”
In a school shooting the lives of the teachers and all the students are equally at risk, so it’s absurd on its face to say that a teacher should be tasked with maintaining order. In that situation it is helpful if everyone involved has learned how to make themselves as safe as possible. It’s also absurd on its face to say that preparedness is a bad idea, for an event that can result in multiple deaths, which cannot be predicted, and there is currently no strategy to prevent. On the other hand, if a child is choking or has an allergic reaction,.the solution is to get the teacher or nurse, who has learned the Hiemlich maneuver and has an epi-pen. I’m also curious where you got the impression that kids don’t learn the Heimlich or learn about food allergies at school.
Preparedness can be a bad idea if we’re terrifying students about something that is very very unlikely to occur.
You’re implying that students would not know about and/or be frightened of school shootings if there weren’t preparedness exercises. You’re also implying that the number of children who die in school shootings is too negligible to justify large-scale concern (which is in line with your other posts on this thread).It’s kind of the perfect internet argument, since it expands and contracts reality to fit the needs of the writer. There’s suddenly an epidemic of kids suffering from active-shooter drills, while the actual deaths of children are dwarfed by some irrelevant trivia about people falling out of bed.
You seem very mad, and I don’t know why. Let’s step back.I think the shooter drills are less about actual preparedness than they are about making parents feel better that they’ve done what they can. It’s telling that we don’t generally do shooter drills at our workplaces, despite the fact that lots of mass shootings happen there, and most of us don’t train our kids for what happens if there’s a shooter in our home, while we’re out as a family, etc. Why not? I think the reason is that it’s particularly terrifying to imagine that our kids will face a violent, dangerous attack while we aren’t with them. If we are with our kids, our basic answer for what will happen is that we, the adults, will handle it as best we can, and it’s probably not worthwhile to burden kids with it. But that’s basically the right answer here too. I’m not saying that we do nothing about school shootings. Get security guards, and train teachers, and (when necessary) limit bookbags. And I’m certainly in favor of restricting guns, though the political challenges for doing so are significant. But I don’t know that we’re getting a lot out of making kids responsible for preparing to handle these problems.
We do have fire drills, however, and have done for a very long time. In my day, we had to do bomb threat drills as well.While older students might be able to not practice, you try cowering in a bathroom with a group of 20 kindergartners and making sure they don’t talk when they haven’t practiced.
I think people widely recognize the atom bomb drills as basically useless — they scared students without meaningfully making them safer from the risk of an atomic bomb. Obviously that’s easier to say in hindsight. But I think the active shooter drills have much the same problem.
I think a sentence like this is basically mandatory in every AV Club article. There is a lot to despair about in America today, and things certainly are worse in a lot of ways than they were a few years ago, but the reality is that we’re a lot safer now than at pretty much any time in history.
Counterpoint when it comes to school shootings, which is what he’s actually referring to in this article”: “The U.S. has had 1,316 school shootings since 1970 and these numbers are increasing. 18% of school shootings have taken place since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.” https://www.thetrace.org/2019/08/children-teens-gun-deaths-data/
School shootings are depressingly frequent, but it’s absurd hyperbole to say that a students risk “life and limb every time they enter a homeroom.” 68 people died in school shootings in 2021. A significant increase in a small number can still result in a small number. For reference, 450 people die in America every year falling out of bed. Would you say you’re taking your life in your hands every time you go to bed?
People who die in falls from bed are typically disabled and/or frail and in medical facilities. If you belong to a high risk group then yes, your life is at risk when you are in a bed at a medical facility. That’s why hospitals are required to identify people at high risk of falls and take active steps (like bedrails and monitoring for delirium) that prevent falls. School shootings induce a greater response from society because the risk is not predictable, they result in mass casualties (including death, injury, and long-term psychological effects on survivors), they involve children, and lawmakers are not taking active steps to prevent them.
Ortega has been great in everything I’ve seen her in. Looking forward to seeing her as Wednesday Addams.
It’s good you’re looking forward to it, because once Tim Burton finds a dark-haired girl with big eyes who he can slather in white makeup, he doesn’t let go. Prepare to see Ortega crammed into Burton projects until the heat death of the universe.
Between this and three Sundance abortion movies, this is shaping up to be a fun and upbeat viewing season!
I watched it yesterday and found it very moving. I have a teenage daughter, so by nature I was viewing the film more through the lens of Julie Bowen (which, considering she’s rumored to have had an affair with Tucker Carlson, really makes me want to disassociate from her in all aspects) but I think it captured that absolutely helpless feeling you have when your child experiences something they never should have to experience.
It was also quite funny – Vada rolling on e while crawling down the stairs had me laughing out loud. I liked how Park chose to show grief and PTSD in a number of ways: those who get productive so that they don’t have to think about it, those who do anything NOT to think about it, etc. Somewhat ironically, perhaps the “healthiest” of the four teens’ reaction came from the one who lost the most.Jenny Ortega was great and I was pleasantly surprised by Maddie Ziegler. It was weird watching someone I’ve only ever seen as a young adolescent suddenly be, well, a grown up, but she didn’t distract from the story which is about as much as you can hope for when it comes to a former child star who kept making that one face when she danced.The screaming into the void part was dumb and I’m still looking askance at any parent who just keeps hanging out in Japan after their daughter’s school was shot up.