Feeling-Filled "Fallout" Is Not For The Faint Of Heart
Starring Jenna Ortega, Maddie Ziegler, Niles Fitch, Will Ropp, Lumi Pollack, John Ortiz, Julie Bowen, Shailene Woodley
Rated R
Drama
Run time: 2 hr, 32 min
Directed and written by Megan Park
On HBO Max January 27, 2022
It would be incredibly easy for a movie about a school shooting to be exploitative, gory or even glamorized, but The Fallout manages to avoid all of those possibilities. It’s far from being light and fluffy. This is a story about trauma, plain and simple. And it’s within this simplicity that the movie excels. The main event isn’t even shown on screen, and it’s over and done with during the first quarter of the film. It puts you in the mind of the main characters; they too are isolated and are having to guess and infer what every gunshot and every shriek pointed to. It was hard to decide if it was worse knowing or not knowing. I have thankfully never been put in this kind of situation outside of media portrayals, but it feels the closest representation of what that horrific, life-changing event must do to survivors.
The Fallout begins with the calm before the storm. We see Vada (Ortega) and her friend Nick (Ropp) going about a standard day: sneaking in a coffee run before school, laughing about inside jokes and going through the motions in class. When Vada is texted an SOS from her sister, Amelia (Pollack), she leaves class to call her, discovers everything is pretty much fine and takes advantage of the break to go to the bathroom. It’s almost empty, with only Mia (Ziegler) in there, fixing her make up before picture day. Everything is normal. Then, the gunshots and screaming starts. We go through some tense moments with the girls, including the appearance of another terrified student, Quinton (Fitch). Once we are able to confirm the ordeal is over, we spend the rest of the film watching these teenagers trying to recover and sort out the PTSD that comes from living through this kind of event.
The only part of this film that took me out of it was the casting of Shailene Woodley as the psychiatrist Vada sees post-shooting. With most of this cast seeming recognizable but not necessarily top tier celebrities, she stuck out in an unexpected way, especially since she only has a couple of scenes in the whole story. The relevance of her character, as a mental health professional who is trying to help these students cope, is high, but it would have been nice to see an actor that would be able to vanish into the role rather than stand out. All of the teens in this movie are incredible, and they clearly represent different identities and social groups that are found at almost any high school. The interactions between each combination of pairings feel natural, especially when they discover they have more in common than they realized after having that shared experience.
This movie is something I’ve never seen before. Often, when the main action happens off screen, it gives off vibes of trying to save money or not having the capacity to do a huge scene justice. In this case, it puts us in the shoes of the characters we follow through the rest of the film. We know what they know. We saw what they saw. So we process things along with them, going through moments of joy that they are still alive, attacks of survivor’s guilt as they learn more about the shooting and desperate wishes to just feel normal again. In our world, one that unfortunately has school shootings occur more often than they ever should, this could have been a rehashing of what we see in the news. Instead, it becomes a human behavior study and gives us an hour and a half look into what such a horrible tragedy leaves behind. It’s not tidy or formulaic. It’s not a straight line to recovery. It’s messy, full of ups and downs, and the portrayal of that so explicitly in The Fallout is what makes it so powerful.