Destin Daniel Cretton’s SXSW-award-winning debut is optimistically feel-good, bathed in Californian sunshine and night-time neon. This helps the sometimes bitter medicine of the damaged lives at its foster home setting slip down without a murmur. Cretton used to work at a “short term 12” home (where the state puts children for up to a year) and sympathises with everyone here.
Self-help platitudes are never far away in a place where everyone’s in therapy and on medication, but neither are rougher barbs to hook you. Grace (Brie Larson) and Mason (John Gallagher Jr) lead a laid-back staff, unfazed by kids’ screaming sprints for freedom. Their budding relationship is also full of bantering affection. But Grace’s pregnancy, and more than professional empathy with two abused teenagers, tears open the scabs of her own past. These literal, livid scars run down her legs, in a place where self-harm is endemic too.
Larson (pictured right), only 23 at the time of shooting, is excellent as a seemingly strong team leader barely a step away from her fragile young charges. Likeable warmth, humour, confused fear and anger chase across her face. Cretton is equally delicate switching between troubled kids at the home and Grace and Mason’s choppy lives. Marcus (Keith Stanfield), who pours his hurt into raps, and sardonic semi-Goth Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), are given well-drawn space. Thriller-like momentum is even stoked from this emotional jumble. Short Term 12 pretties up pain, but you never doubt that it or the kindness that meets it is movingly real.
Extras are a good-humoured but only occasionally informative Making Of, and a short film on reconciliation from UK charity The Forgiveness Project.
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