Short Term 12, and the high stakes of a small world

Short Term 12 (2013) may be one of my favorite films.

First, the talent is undeniable. They were able to gather some of the most talented young stars before their heights of fame—Brie Larson, who would later go on to star in Room (2015) and Captain Marvel (2019), LaKeith Stanfield, who would later go on to star in Sorry to Bother You (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), Rami Malek, who would later go on to star in Mr. Robot (2015–2019) and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), and Kaitlyn Dever, who would later go on to star in Booksmart (2019).

There is, of course, John Gallagher Jr., who perhaps has garnered the least amount of celebrity clout from the lot of them, but he will forever own a sliver of my heart for his work in the original Broadway cast of Spring Awakening and The Newsroom (2012–2014).

Second, it tells a story that is so small and specific, yet holds immeasurable weight. It's proof that the stakes for dramatic tension don't need to exist in the overblown proportions of saving the world or a city or someone's life. Dramatic weight can exist inside a single room, with only two people inside. In fact, reducing scale can create extraordinary amounts of connection and intimacy that can only be explored in small stories. The story isn't about the world. It's about the people who inhabit it.

Short Term 12 takes place in, you guessed it, Short Term 12, a group home for at-risk teens. It's run by a small team of 20-somethings, whose job is to create a safe, stable environment for the teenagers, many of whom come from troubled families.

Perhaps it's because director and writer Destin Daniel Cretton pulled from his own experiences working in a group home, but Short Term 12 just feels like an honest film. There is no pretense or self-importance about the story he's telling. It's just a snapshot into the lives of a group of troubled, broken young people trying to help other troubled, broken young people—many of whom who have direct traumas that reflect right back into the lives of the people trying to help them.

It doesn't aim to tell you how these traumas are "fixed"; it just takes you through each person's individual journey of confronting their pain, living with their traumas, and moving forward with their life. Even at the end of its tidy, 96-minute run time, it still leaves spools of thread unwound. We're merely given the privilege of feeling for and watching these people live their lives for the short period we're allowed. Their story goes on without us.

It's a film that revels in tiny moments. Pain can be this gut-wrenching, deafening thing, but in Short Term 12, pain is experienced in the subtle shift of a facial expression or a barely-audible sentence. Compassion is shown mostly in moments of complete silence: cards left on a bed, a hug shared after a painful confession, or a small toy given freely and silently.

And this is the beauty of Short Term 12. Something that gets lost so often are these quiet, small stories, where the stakes, frankly, could not seem smaller for a cinematic universe. A boy is anxious at the thought of his impending 18th birthday, which means he'll need move out of the safety and stability of a group home to live in his own in a world that has been nothing but cruel to him. A girl, placed in the group home for the week, doesn't want to make any friends, because she's going back to live with her dad soon. But it's clear there's something hiding beneath the surface. A young woman is pregnant with a baby she seemingly doesn't want to keep.

I won't delve much deeper into the plot, because, like all good films, I believe this is best experienced as it was meant to be. My paltry words simply could not do it justice.

It's not this grandiose story with millions of lives at stake. It's a story that focuses on people that we spend most of our lives barely even thinking about—and sometimes, actively ignoring. The stories held within the movie feel so authentic, so real, and so intimate that it's almost surprising how forcefully Cretton is able to draw you in. It tugs at you, and you are immersed in each character's struggle. Their pain is universal. Their desire and desperation of people to be able to connect with one another is universal.

This is compelling storytelling at its finest. You don't need to understand their world, because you can understand how their pain manifests. We see the struggle behind faces that try their best to conceal the storm that hides underneath. The film takes you by the hand, shows you the ugliness, and asks you to empathize with these people.

Short Term 12 doesn't need the stakes its actors were faced with later in their other works to make their dramatic weight mean something. There doesn't need to be a high-brow commentary on our broken society like in Sorry to Bother You or the risk of humanity being wiped out like in Captain Marvel to capture our interest. It's simply the human struggle of facing one day after the next, confronting the pain given to you by an unjust world and living with it. And this captures you even more strongly than any other "weightier" stake.

Because even the quietest of whispers can (and should) shake through you like a storm.