“The Fallout” review | Hollywood journalist

Jenna Ortega, Maddie Ziegler and Niles Fitch play California high school students brought together by their shared experience in a raging shooting.

It’s a horrific sign of the times that school shooting is already a well-traveled movie trope. Many films, among which the elephant, And then I go and We need to talk about Kevin, explored the (male) killers’ alienation from their families and peers, and the preparation for their attacks. In its overloaded way, Vox Lux involved the other side of the coin, a young woman who had witnessed a murder in the classroom. With the clever and affectionate The consequences, writer-director Megan Park focuses on a college student’s struggle to regain her balance after surviving a campus massacre.

Among films that delve into this busy territory, Park’s stands out for its combination of understated intimacy and, as the title suggests, its unwavering focus on aftermath. Only three adults appear onscreen, their key but decidedly supporting roles in the teen-centric drama, which features a quintet of stunning young actors, led by Jenna Ortega.

The Californian suburb where Park installed his first feature film is multicultural and privileged. Children do not want comfort, even if some of them are content with absent parents. 16-year-old Vada (Ortega) does not fit into the latter category; her parents are, as she said to a friend, “good parents”. She’s a quick-witted high school girl who essentially falls out of bed in the morning, barely brushing her hair, unlike her smart little sister’s carefully made-up daughter, Amelia (an awesome Lumi Pollack). Despite their differences, they have a close bond. When Amelia finds herself in need, the person she texts to is her older sister.

But soon Vada goes through something that turns every aspect of her life upside down and creates distance in her closest relationships. Gunshots ring out in her school, and for six terrifying minutes, she cuddles in a bathroom with two students she only knows by sight: the glamorous Mia (Maddie Ziegler) that she came from. send something sneaky to his best friend, Nick (Will Ropp) and Quinton (Niles Fitch, from It’s us), who stumbles into the girls’ bathroom covered in blood, after seeing her brother being shot.

The sight of Quinton a few scenes later greeting Vada and Mia at her brother’s funeral is heartbreaking. He’s a skinny teenager in an adult costume. Fitch’s performance conveys heartbreaking depths within Quinton’s silences as well as between conversational lines. At every turn, the youth and innocence of Park’s characters pierce the smooth surface of the suburbs.

The pilot, who has directed videos for Billie Eilish and others, only dives once into the bag of music maneuvers and music video, and while this scene does move the story forward to some extent, it does stand out. in this calm drama. (The film’s excellent, low-key score is by Finneas O’Connell, producer and brother of Eilish.) Mainly Park lets its actors interact, their humor unmoved, their pain unfathomable, their hormones on the rise and their flirtations stopped.

Vada in particular excels at playing cold and deflection, and Ortega’s beautifully nuanced turn includes the nothing-to-watch façade here and cracks in the armor. We feel the sting of resentment when she watches her mother and sister being silly in the kitchen; this sort of spontaneity is now foreign to him. Vada’s defense mechanisms give way to something heart-opening as she and Mia gravitate towards each other. Via text and video chats, then IRL, in the gated property where Mia essentially lives on her own, they hold the world at bay, delaying their return to school for as long as their parents allow.

For Mia, it means endlessly. Her fathers, both artists, are absent in Japan, and apparently her traumatic experience was not enough to bring one of them home. They’re almost always gone, she notes over her ubiquitous glass of wine, letting her enjoy the jacuzzi, pool, and sauna when she’s not at school or in dance class. While Vada slips away during their hard to know you phase, Mia is much softer than the sexualized image she projects in the dance videos she posts. Vada could also understand that the girl she has long considered out of her league with her 82,000 Instagram followers is friendless and lonely.

This is not a poor little rich girl cliché. Actress-dancer Ziegler, a veteran of Sia videos (and also a star of the musician’s widely released feature film Music), fully inhabits the role. Soulful and intelligent, Mia has a habit of hiding her pain; the little masquerade that she stages the first time she welcomes Vada to her home is a brilliant scriptwriting that tells us everything in a few seconds without a word.

Vada’s parents, her “white and anxious” mother (Julie Bowen) and her Latin American father of a few words (John Ortiz) vacillate between hyper-attentive hover and recoil to give her space. It takes a surprisingly long time, in terms of film length, before they send him to therapy. The consequences, fortunately, is not a therapy film. And precisely because Park is not interested in the orthodoxy of therapeutic discourse, the two psychotherapy sessions she includes are particularly powerful, with a strong and stabilizing Shailene Woodley defying the stereotypes of the film psychologist. (The same goes for his character’s office and clothing; here and throughout the film, Justin Dragonas’ production design and Tasha Goldthwait’s costumes are lived-in and, even high-end, little shown. )

The consequences does not claim that there are easy answers for Vada. She wakes up in the dark of nightmares, panicked and shaking. Her daylight hours drift into a dreamy suburban landscape of break time and drug experimentation. His withdrawal infuriates Nick, his former partner in wisdom. Rather than internalizing the trauma, he becomes an anti-gun activist, and a perfect Ropp captures his passion as well as his well-being merit.

With the intimate lens of Kristen Correll and the skillful editing of Jennifer Lee, Park plots a trajectory that can be hesitant or headlong, from that heart-wrenching bathroom scene to Vada’s disastrous first day at school and beyond. of the. The filmmaker skillfully highlights the way in which violence has broken the sheltered orbits of her characters, the terrible disconnection at the heart of her story. After the shoot, Vada gradually puts together a collection of memorial programs and places these tributes to her murdered classmates in a box she keeps in her bedroom. It is a spacious room, decorated, in a disconcerting way, with light garlands. As flippant as these smart teens can be, they haven’t quite come out of childhood and are making their way to some kind of grace.

Location: South by Southwest Film Festival (Narrative Feature Film Competition)
Production companies: Clear Horizon and SSS Entertainment in association with SSS Film Capital, 828 Media Capital, Good Pals and Mind the Gap Productions
Interpretation: Jenna Ortega, Maddie Ziegler, Niles Fitch, Will Ropp, Lumi Pollack, John Ortiz, Julie Bowen, Shailene Woodley
Director-Screenwriter: Megan Park
Producers: David Brown, Shaun Sanghani, Rebecca Miller, Cara Shine, Todd Lundbohm, Giulia Prenna, Joannie Burstein
Executive Producers: Christina Lundbohm, Greg Young, Mark Andrews, Stephanie Denton, Andrew Carlberg, Justin Dragonas
Director of Photography: Kristen Correll
Production designer: Justin Dragonas
Costume designer: Tasha Goldthwait
Editor: Jennifer Lee
Composer: Finneas O’Connell
Casting directors: Marisol Roncali, Chelsea Ellis Bloch
Sales: ICM Partners, Clear Horizon

94 minutes