Metacritic reviews

It’s a remarkable accomplishment: a film with the confidence to pose big questions, and the humility to leave them unanswered.

Mainly Park lets her actors interact, their humor deadpan, their pain unfathomable, their hormones surging and their flirtations halting.

Ortega nails her role as a levelheaded teen who, nevertheless, is still a teen, reeling from an unthinkable event on top of the usual growing pains.

It’s a memorably stark and authentic work that is at times so gut-wrenching it’s almost unbearable — but Park deftly weaves in moments of warmth and humor and hope as well. This is a special film.

While The Fallout allows for lightness to occasionally emerge, the film never forgets the experience at its center, one that can never be fully forgotten.

Writer-director Megan Park’s unassuming feature debut sensitively argues that young people should never have to face such horrific circumstances — but, given enough time, they can prove stronger than their concerned parents imagine.

These young performers are always true to themselves. Honest and bare without inhibitions. Which is fitting for a movie that’s about rebuilding oneself and one’s connections to the world by telling yourself that the pain is okay. The hurt is real. And the love we give never dies. Park’s The Fallout is a resilient character study of grief in all its forms.

Covering the same ground as many fiction and non-fiction works about grieving and action in the wake of tragedy, Park’s picture feels somewhat more nuanced.

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.

It’s a school shooting movie for this particular moment and plays like a dispatch from the front lines. It’s past trying to figure out what these tragedies mean. It just wants to explore how a person might assimilate such a trauma and go forward in life.