Moviegoer: The Fallout
The kids aren’t alright, but they’re trying
By Diana Beechener
On school picture day, Vada Cavell (Jenna Ortega: Scream) bumps into one of the most popular girls in school, Mia (Maddie Ziegler: West Side Story), in the bathroom. The two share a sweet moment that’s interrupted by a series of loud bangs. Mia is confused, but Vada isn’t—she grabs Mia and hides in a bathroom stall.
The girls listen in terror as an active shooter runs through the halls of their school. They weep silently and hold each other as they wait for this nightmare to end. When the door opens and a blood-soaked boy stumbles in, the girls hide him as well. The group is lucky, the shooter never comes into the bathroom, and they’re spared. But are they?
Days later Vada is still waking with nightmares. Her parents are frantically trying to help her, but Vada has convinced herself that the less emotion she shows, the more she’s going to heal. She sleepwalks through life with a disaffected air, responding to her parents’ probing with eye rolls and sneers. When her parents insist on a therapist, Vada tries to use her wit and sarcasm to prove she’s fine. The therapist isn’t so sure, which just makes Vada more annoyed. They don’t get it.
The only people who do get it are Mia and Niles—the two people who cowered with Vada in the bathroom. They speak her language, filled with memes, TikTok dances, and irritation at well-meaning adults. Her new friends lead Vada to question who she is and what she wants in life.
As Vada explores this post-traumatic world, she starts to lose things. Old friendships fracture, her parents don’t know what to do with her attitude, and her beloved little sister becomes an annoyance. How do you move forward after the unthinkable? And better yet, how do you TikTok about it?
The Fallout is a carefully observed, beautifully acted movie about how a new generation deals with a trauma that is almost unique to millennials and zoomers. First time feature director Megan Park (who is also an actress) uses restraint as a powerful tool to tell her story. For those afraid of exploitative sequences or lurid scenes, The Fallout avoids sensationalism deftly. You never see the gun or the shooter, because the terror of knowing they exist on the other side of the wall is enough to understand why the kids are sobbing in the bathroom, wondering if they’ll live.
That reality is what makes this film something interesting instead of something titillating. Unlike other “realistic teen” media like Euphoria, The Fallout doesn’t lean too hard on shocking teen behavior. Yes, Vada tries some alcohol and even a drug or two—but there’s no shocking fallout. She’s a kid, she does dumb kid things, and she ends up just fine afterwards. Park’s lack of handwringing is one of the most powerful tools of the whole film. The movie understands that the real formative event in Vada’s life happened in that bathroom, a glass of wine is just a stumble as she finds her feet.
Park also has a brilliant sense of detail. She uses tiny little moments to show just how poorly Mia, Vada, and Niles are coping. There’s an especially heartbreaking sequence that features Vada piling memorial ceremony cards into her keepsake box, showing off the literal stack of lives lost that she deals with. Park doesn’t judge her characters for what they choose to do after the incident, they’re judging each other. Vada’s best friend decides to throw his energy into activism, becoming a spokesperson for the victims. He can’t understand why Vada seems to be mired in inaction.
At the center of The Fallout is a brilliant performance by Ortega. Vada is a smart girl who thinks showing emotion is weakness. She clings to her disaffected attitude as she tries to process what’s happened to her. The moments when her shell cracks, when she can’t hold together her laid-back veneer, are touching. Ortega brings a vulnerability to Vada that reveals how innocent she is, and how desperately she wants to feel normal again.
The Fallout is a hard film to watch at times, but one that might be helpful if you’ve got a younger family member that seems to communicate through GIFs instead of words. It’s a tender observation of teens in crisis, without the histrionics that these sorts of films usually rely upon.
The Fallout is available on HBOMax.
Good Drama * R * 92 mins.