Summary

• The Fallout's ending highlights the lasting impact of trauma from school shootings, showing recovery is far from linear.
• Director Megan Park deliberately ends the film ambiguously to reflect the ongoing issue of school violence and trauma recovery.
• Vada's journey in The Fallout emphasizes that healing from trauma is a complex process that can never fully erase painful memories.

The Fallout ending is notably devastating as the film is an emotional drama dealing with the aftermath of a school shooting. The Fallout follows survivor Vada (Jenna Ortega), and her struggle to overcome trauma. The Fallout ends with a tragic reminder that such emotional wounds can never truly be overcome when acts of mass violence remain common. Written and directed by Megan Park, The Fallout has received acclaim for its writing and direction and a cast of talented young actors, headlined by Ortega.

The Fallout introduces its characters with an offscreen school shooting in the first 10 minutes, as a shocked Vada hides in a bathroom stall with classmates Mia (Maddie Ziegler) and Quinton (Niles Fitch). The rest of the movie deals with Vada's attempts to deal with her experience and move on, as her increasingly erratic behavior begins to worry her family. However, The Fallout's ending explains how tentative such healing can be after a traumatic event as it grapples with several complex themes.

The Fallout is available to stream on Max.

What Happens In The Fallout Ending?

The Fallout Shows The Violence Never Ends

By the end of The Fallout, Vada seems to have reached a hopeful ending.

Throughout The Fallout, Vada begins dealing with her trauma in a healthier way. She reconciles with her family members, resolving to stop keeping secrets from them and revealing what they mean to her. She and Mia resolve to stay friends, and every shade of the complex and emotionally nuanced journey Vada goes through is played perfectly by Jenna Ortega. By the end of The Fallout, Vada seems to have reached a hopeful ending. However, what comes next shows just how difficult moving on from violent trauma is.

At the end of The Fallout, Vada is texting Mia and seems to have finally found a moment of happiness. However, this moment is interrupted by a news alert about another school shooting in Ohio. The news returns Vada to her trauma, and she is roiled in emotional pain as the movie closes, with the sounds over a black screen suggesting that she is having a panic attack.

How Trauma Explains Vada's Actions

Vada Struggles To Make Sense Of The Tragedy

The Fallout ending can be explained by how Vada downplays or denies the effect that the shooting has had on her throughout the movie. She repeatedly describes herself as "chill" or "low-key" and pushes away her mother's attempts to get her to open up. However, throughout the movie, Vada's actions become more erratic. She sleeps with Mia and kisses Quinton, advances that seem to be born more out of confusion than love. Vada also begins experimenting with drugs, moving from cannabis to ecstasy.

Vada's traumatic experience during the shooting shapes her behavior changes.

These actions are out of character for the fairly straight-laced girl Vada seemed to be before the shooting. Trauma is a complex psychological factor, one which defies easy explanation or correlation. Vada's traumatic experience during the shooting shapes her behavior changes. Like others in her class, she is searching for a meaning to the tragedy and why she survived. Narratives about trauma are seemingly everywhere in movies and TV shows, but few have the subtlety of The Fallout.

In addition to trying to establish an emotional connection, Vada's advances toward Mia and Quinton, whom she hid inside the stall with, could be an attempt to make the shooting part of a narrative that ends with a romantic connection, giving the senseless violence some meaning in her life story. Vada's drug use is also likely an attempt to escape from trauma or at least numb the pain.

Why The Fallout's Ending Is So Devastating

The Ending Shows Changes Are Never Made

The Fallout's ending explains that, no matter how much interpersonal healing Vada goes through, she will always be vulnerable to her traumatic memories due to the modern prevalence of US mass shootings. By some estimates, there have been over 1,000 school shootings in the United States in the last 50 years (via Sandy Hook Promise). School shootings have also become a cultural fixation, appearing in everything from serious dramas like Mass to the more exploitative American Horror Story.

For someone like Vada, it would be almost impossible to avoid hearing triggering news or seeing depictions of other school shootings. Some may see The Fallout as a rallying cry to counter school shootings, most obviously through tightening the United States' famously permissive gun laws. Vada's old friend Nick becomes an activist for the cause, appearing on television to plea for people to take action so that mass shootings will no longer be such a familiar event.

Vada's story is familiar to thousands of Americans.

The final moments of The Fallout are so devastating because they recognize that, far from being unique, Vada's story is familiar to thousands of Americans. As long as mass shootings are a regular occurrence, her healing can never truly be complete.

The True Meaning Of The Fallout

The Movie Is About Survivor's Guilt

The Fallout ending is best explained as not just about legislative changes. While The Fallout includes Nick's earnest pro-gun control perspective, it also suggests that his political activism is partly fueled as another response to trauma, an attempt to make sense of his survival among others' deaths and give meaning to it. This same intent toward action was seen in the real-life political activism of the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

Rather than sending a political message, HBO's The Fallout provides a subtle examination of how trauma functions and how recovery can often be a multifaceted and incomplete process. Vada is continually uncertain about how she feels and wants to proceed. Moments that seem to be markers of success, like her return to school or her progress with therapist Anna (played by Shailene Woodley), are treated with ambivalence.

While her connections with her family, and her newfound relationships with Mia and Quinton, help her recover, she also lashes out at those close to her and damages those relationships. Just as Vada seems to have found peace at the end, reality pulls the rug out from under her.

Often, popular media, whether it be superhero TV shows or prestige dramas, offer a fairly schematic idea of trauma and recovery. The Fallout's ending shows that recovery from trauma and PTSD is far from linear and doesn't fit within the rhythms of a 90-minute movie. The final minute drives home that this is especially true in a world where the larger social causes of violence go unaddressed.

Why The Fallout Ending Needed To Be Ambiguous

There Are No Easy Answers To Traumatic Events

Scores of films over the years feature ambiguous endings to maintain audience conversation long after the credits. Endings like these can be a tool to add cleverness, resonance, and depth, and they are often the hallmarks of a highly regarded piece of cinema. The Fallout's ambiguous and hard-to-explain ending does designate it as a thoughtful and meaningful story, but this maneuver is about much more than just adding more intrigue to a work of fiction.

The Fallout's ending is the best way for it to stay true to the lived experience of trauma that people deal with in the real world.

The ambiguity of The Fallout's ending is the best way for it to stay true to the lived experience of trauma that people deal with in the real world. If Vada had neatly wrapped up her entire experience and moved on fully healed in just a 90-minute film, it would imply that trauma goes away easily and would cheapen the hard-earned recovery process by making it look like the flip of a switch.

On the other hand, if Vada were to conclude the film still in an entirely hopeless state, this bleak depiction would imply that traumatized people can never find healing from their experience, which is an equally harmful message. Instead, The Fallout's ending, in which Vada has begun her healing process but still carries the indelible mark of her traumatic experience, manages to bridge this gap and portray trauma more authentically.

How Director Megan Park Explains The Fallout Ending

The Director Admits This Was A Panic Attack At The End

Director Megan Park, who previously acted in The Secret Life of the American Teenager before getting behind the camera, explained The Fallout's ending in an interview with Hollywood Life. Park says that she had the ending in mind from the start. She confirms that Vada is experiencing a panic attack in the final minutes of The Fallout, and the audience only hears her reaction through audio. Park identifies the unhappy ambiguity of the ending as part of the point:

" I always knew the movie had to end that way because this isn’t a problem that’s over. This is a problem that is continuing right now. It’s a difficult ending, for sure. I think you hopefully leave with a glimmer of hope that Vada is starting to gather the skills to learn how to cope and to learn how to live her life holding this trauma with her that will stay with her forever in some way, shape, or form. But it’s not over, so I think that it really had to be the ending that it was."

Park explains that the choice to cut to black on Jenna Ortega's final The Fallout scene was to depict Vada's trauma without traumatizing the viewer, like the choice not to show the shooting itself. The ending of The Fallout works to remind the viewer not only that school shootings are an ongoing issue, but that recovery from trauma is a long process that can involve many backward steps. In this way, Park achieves her goal of using an ambiguous ending to depict the long-lasting impact of violence.

The Fallout Ending Is Its Most Important Aspect

The Traumatic Memories Never Go Away

Considering how often the media covered the topic of school shootings, making a movie about the subject might not stand out on its own. The Fallout ending is so important to the film's message. So many movies and series focus on depicting a traumatic event and then how those involved transcend their trauma, but The Fallout is devastating in how it shows that many people can't move on. Things were going well for Vada, but one mention of a school shooting on the news put her back to the day she experienced it herself.

It shows that even when there is a glimmer of hope, this trauma never leaves someone. Ending the film with a simple cut to black and silence, other than the sounds of Vada's panic attack sends a powerful message. It's an integral aspect that sets The Fallout apart from so many other movies that focus on the same topic. Though it wasn't a huge commercial hit, it's the kind of film that will remain poignant as time goes on, especially if school shootings continue to happen at an alarming rate.