By: Livi Cudd
How would you deal with the trauma of a school shooting? Would you be openly devastated, or would you put up barriers between yourself and the people you love?
The 2021 film The Fallout depicts this perfectly. It displays a very accurate portrayal of the modern teenage world, as well as the impact a catastrophic event such as a school shooting has on teens in this day and age.
In the film, students at a high school experience a school shooting, and two girls, Vada and Mia, hide in the bathroom with a boy named Quinton. After the event, the rest of the movie is about the characters dealing with the trauma of the shooting and finding ways to cope, sometimes in negative ways.
After the main character Vada experiences the shooting at her high school, she starts to withdraw from her family and avoids the situation by not talking about it with them or her therapist, which is a common coping mechanism among teens.
I loved how grounded in reality and modernized the movie was; it made it seem believable that something like that could happen in the real world. The amazing thing about it was that it showed that the kids struggled with the aftermath of the event in different ways. Some of them used it to help make a change in the world, like Vada’s friend Nick did, but some of them, like Vada, tried to avoid it as much as they could and rebelled. It made the movie painfully relatable and realistic.
The film depicts realistic mood changes and PTSD signs after an event as traumatic as a school shooting, and I really applaud the writers and director for that. They handle the issue of school shootings and mental health struggles with as much respect as possible while making it very realistic at the same time.
It is one of the better coming-of-age teen movies I have seen.
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