by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

What’s fun about trauma is that there’s just so goddamn much of it. Plus, it comes in all shapes and sizes. From personal experiences to generational trauma: everybody’s got it.

We’ve spent the last year going through so much of it, on such a global level, and because of this there’s a pretty large swath of media at SXSW that deal with different kinds of trauma. Some better than others, but I wanted to talk about a few that I watched and what I took away from them. 

Broadcast Signal Intrusion

I’ve finally hit the point where a film set before 2010 makes me go, “Oooh! A period piece.” Which… isn’t wrong, but it’s an odd feeling that I haven’t gotten over, or properly processed. Something me and the lead of Broadcast Signal Intrusion, James (Harry Shum, Jr.), have in common. The “failure to process certain feelings” thing, not… anything else that happens to him in this film. 

Set in 1999 at the cusp of the modern internet, James is working as an archivist who is moving old broadcasts from VHS tapes onto DVDs. One night he comes across a broadcast hijacking that freaks him out, as much as it draws his undivided attention. As he falls down the rabbit hole of the conspiracy, he discovers that there were three intrusions over a short period of time. James, haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his wife, throws himself into figuring out what the intrusions were all about. 

When he uncovers that three women went missing just before the broadcasts, and the timeline matches up to his wife’s disappearance, he begins to spiral. He hasn’t processed the trauma surrounding his wife, so he has no choice but to believe she was one of the hijacker’s victims. He proceeds to throw caution to the wind, putting himself in danger, in order to hunt down the person he believed kidnapped the women and performed the hijackings.

Ultimately, I think this film was fine. As far as the conceit of this round of reviews go… it’s got lots of trauma, but absolutely no processing. Not that every story about trauma needs to have it examined and picked apart. Life isn’t like that. Some pain will go unexamined, or will need to be reexamined for the rest of that person’s life. However, Broadcast Signal Intrusion is much more interested in its setting, than it is in what James is actually going through. I don’t know that I fully blame it, though, because the setting is extremely cool. The film has a really great vibe through it’s cinematography and production design. Also, I’m always glad to see Harry Shum, Jr. doing great work. He does a lot with a deeply erratic character, and it’s always nice to see him thriving in adult work. 

Them

I have no idea exactly where this horror anthology is going (we were able to watch the first two episodes), but damn will it be one hell of a ride by the time we get there. Little Marvin’s horror anthology series kicks off its first season as the story of housing in post-World War II America. Who gets it easily and without question… and who gets tortured about it.

The series is set mainly in 1953, as the Emory family moves from the Jim Crow South (North Carolina, to be specific), to Compton, Los Angeles. They’re part of the historic tradition of Black migration away from the South after WWII. And, oh man, do the white people in Compton not want them there. There’s even the spirit of an evil white lady in their house, that starts terrorizing them from within. They aren’t safe anywhere - an issue that is still painfully relevant for Black Americans almost 70 years later. 

I will say that there is one thing this series reminds me of: Suburibicon, George Clooney’s absolute shit storm of a film. One of the subplots of that film is about a Black family that moves into the white neighborhood and is violently removed by way of terror. Them is shaping up to be what I wished that film would have been. It wasn’t, though, because it simply didn’t care about the Black characters that should have been the film’s heart. But in Them, the Emorys get to be the leads, and the show allows the white neighbors to not just be faceless villains - they’re filled with intent and we see it in stark detail.

Coupled with some great storytelling, there are some truly great performances so far in this show, especially Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde) and Henry (Ashley Thomas). These are performances that perfectly unite past trauma with what’s happening in the present day of the series, creating a powerful show that feels modern in the most horrible kinds of way. 

Obviously something horrible is going to happen, possibly multiple somethings, before the Emorys’ ten days of terror are up. I’m itching to know exactly what and who’s gonna make it out of this alive. 

The Fallout

If you’ve been a high school student in America any time between 1999 and now, then you know what it’s like to not only fear the possibility of a school shooting - but to have active shooter drills as part of your normal school life. I haven’t been a high school student in over a decade and the feeling of knowing that everybody in your school is hiding against a wall, or under a desk, in a locked classroom for a set amount of time still rings in my brain like the loudest bell. 

The Fallout is the story of what happens after a school shooting. On the day of the attack, Vada (Jenna Ortega) gets pulled out of class by an emergency call from her younger sister, who just started her period. Annoyed by the actual lack of an emergency, she decides to linger in the bathroom when she sees Mia (Maddie Ziegler) doing her makeup for picture day. It’s then that, in the hallway outside the girl’s bathroom, the gun fire starts. Quickly Quinton (Niles Fitch) runs into the bathroom after his brother had been shot in the hallway, and the three of them are bonded forever in a trauma that took less than eight minutes to start and end. But really, that’s all the time in the world. 

It is beyond depressing that there are more school shootings in America, on average, than media exists about them. There is so much trauma packed into that fact, so much that sometimes I can’t even breathe when I think about it. But Writer/Director Megan Park takes an approach unlike many others. We never see the shooter. We never see the attack. We see Quinton covered in blood and we see the funeral pamphlets, but everything about the actual details of the shooting are just what Vada knows. The trauma exists, extremely visibly, in the three teens we’re in the bathroom with. We don’t need to see anybody actually get gunned down to know that what Vada’s going through is real.

I was also struck, especially given the ending of the film, with the statistical fact that school shootings numbers have plummeted in the last year. Not because we’ve actually done anything about them, but because there simply wasn’t in-person school. Which is a thought from which I haven’t recovered.