Short Term 12 is a good film. Watch it.

Short Term 12

Director: Destin Daniel Cretton

Writer: Destin Daniel Cretton

Featuring: Brie Larson, Frantz Turner, John Gallagher Jr., Rami Malek, Alex Calloway, Kevin Hernandez

Grace is a young counsellor working at foster-care home for at-risk-teenagers, she tries her hardest to help those that have been moved from the worst situations to the homes’ care. Life is never easy in the home or in their private lives for Grace and her colleagues. Grace has to make big decisions that will affect the profoundly emotionally scarred kids the home looks after and coupled with an impending marriage, huge turning points in everyone’s lives are looming on the horizon. Can Grace, her colleagues and teenagers cope without risking their future and their prospects of a happy settled life?

This film is so good, so realistic and so intriguing that you could easily mistake it for a documentary.

The story is about real people who try to make changes in people’s lives. That’s real people – not ex-marine musclemen, superheroes or superspies, just real people. Acted to perfection I genuinely forgot the painfully pretty Brie Larson is an actress and not a care-home counsellor.

This film won the L.A, Film Festival and South by Southwest ‘audience award’. Good. It is sad, funny and even at stages scary in proper scary as opposed to ‘monster scary’ way.
The director and writer, Destin Daniel Cretton, has drawn on his experiences of working in a similar type establishment but it is to his credit that draws out naturalistic and authentic acting from all of the cast. Anyone involved in this film can be proud of it.

The home and film are called Short Term 12 because the residents moved into the home are only supposed to be there for no longer than twelve months. They are not bad or ‘evil’ kids and they are not running away from ‘5-O’ on street corners, but from parents and family members who are abusive. These are frightened children who hit out at anyone in the way, but they are not in the film for us to solely pity them and figures that we should feel sorry for

Short Term 12 could have become another manipulative and deliberately tear-jerking film but thanks to the director and actors every scene that does make you want to cry, or become angry, is earned and credible.

This film will never earn major awards, will never be seen by a large audience and will never be spoken about as a great film in the months and years to come.

It should be all of these things.

Do yourself a favour and watch this film at your first opportunity.