I’ve never worked in a place like Short Term 12, but I know those walls. I know that leveled behavior system the teens abhor and the staff barely believes in. I know those community meetings, heartwarming when they’re not erupting with emotional, or sometimes physical aggression. I know that padded room for anger and hurt to dissipate, to be absorbed into walls that will never repeat or share their shame. And I know that manager who seems like he just doesn’t get it, but is really only you twenty years in the future, once you’ve learned what you can and can’t actually control.
No film makes me feel in community with the unique experiences I’ve had in life quite like Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12. It provides validation for the frequently invalidated and offers a stunning portrayal of a perpetual liminal space, where time together—for patients and staff alike—is fleeting. Where you can only do so much, but can also be exactly what someone else needs at the moment they need it.
In the titular short-term care facility, the at-risk teens stay for no longer than 12 months—not a lot of time to stabilize, recover, or learn to trust again. When Grace (Brie Larson) is lays out the parameters of the facility for a new hire, Nate (Rami Malek), her final reminder is both brutally honest and woefully inaccurate: “You are not their parent. You are not their therapist. You are here to create a safe environment, and that’s it.”
When I first saw Short Term 12 in 2013, I’d worked my college summers in a group home, completed two years as a Behavior Intervention teacher, and finished a third year of teaching in Austin with Deaf students who’d experienced complicated, traumatic upbringings. I’d worked with students that even the administration believed were simply passing through, checking one more box on a path towards juvenile detention and, eventually, jail. I didn’t know how to derail them from this outcome; the entire system seemed built to keep them girded to predetermined tracks. All I could do was provide something safe and trustworthy, if temporary.
I had my own “Welcome to Short Term 12” moment on my very first day in a group home for teens. In a duplex hidden behind areas I had driven around and past in my youth, I found myself playing an old school NES with a teenaged client. It seemed so normal at first. We were playing Super Mario and began a Luigi vs Mario challenge round, the kind only possible when you bump into certain parts of the map. I remembered this from my own youth, playing with my cousins. I danced around and then, deciding that this client—with the basketball posters and weight equipment in front of the mirror—had a competitive edge, I made a few nifty moves and won. They then bashed the controller repeatedly into their knee with a fury completely alien to whatever life I thought I had lived. I didn’t bother trying to win after that; only losing with effort. Before I could spend much more time working with them, they ran away from the home. When I saw them months later in a mall food court, I thought maybe they’d reached some level of normalcy. Only weeks later would I read about them in the local newspaper, in what is still one of the most horrifying acts of violence I’ve ever heard about. How do you process that? Where can that story even go—or be told? Short Term 12 feels like the product of people who have lived in that space with me, across miles of land and celluloid, extending a branch of community.
***
When we first hear Marcus (LaKeith Stanfield) rap, with Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.) sitting alongside him, providing an intimate audience and a steady drum beat, it’s a song called, “So You Know What It’s Like.” Marcus zigs and zags with the poetry of his life story, leading to a repeated couplet that you can’t quite shake:
Look into my eyes so you know what it’s like/ To live a life not knowing what a normal life’s like
I immediately thought about all the eyes I’d looked into—in the group home, and with many other students over 15 years of teaching—and how I could almost see their real story. I could see the fear of abandonment. I could see the joy of pleasures a normal life might deem too simple. I could see the way they softened when you drew them the worst goddamn picture of a dinosaur you’ve drawn in your entire life but still you drew the one thing they’d been waiting for someone to finally draw. And hardest of all, I could see how not normal their lives before were, and would continue to be. That’s when you realize the space you hold with them—be it a short term 12 or a school year—is likely the most normal thing they’ll ever experience.
Midway through the film, Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever) is devastated to learn her father won’t show up to take her home for her birthday. She needs a release and doesn’t know a healthy way to obtain it. So she takes off to her room, trying to lock herself inside. Mason, Grace, and Nate push their way through. As soon as the door breaks open, Grace is smashed in the face with the birthday cupcake that Mason had previously gifted Jayden. Limbs are flying. Mason and Nate do a one-armed restraint—a thing I practiced once a year for nearly 10 years, dreading the day I’d actually have to use it—and hold Jayden against the wall on the floor. She’s still trying to get out. She calls Mason weak and spits in Nate’s face, before telling Grace, over and over, that she hates her. “That’s fine,” Grace responds. “You don’t have to like me right now. Just let it pass.”
I saw this kind of rage in the group home and I saw it in the years after I moved to Austin, when I worked with Deaf students who had moved through the foster or adoption system in ways that defied all sense of normalcy. You can learn to ignore the sound of the guttural screams—and the 40th hearing person making a joke about how you can just turn your hearing aid off—but you can never learn to ignore the pain. You can see it in their faces, in the veins emerging in their throats. These children are dormant volcanoes, deep trauma bubbling like magma, ready to blow and unable to control the range of collateral damage.
Rage is the language of pain that cannot be easily removed. It becomes a part of the musculature in children who have endured years of the kind of trauma you protect yourself from learning too much about. And you discover, in that moment, that you can only allow yourself to become a target. To let them get it out of their system, if only temporarily. To ask them about the things of childhood they should be able to enjoy—Spiderman, Spongebob, a drawing of Superman—and hope they can find the light.
We do see some light shortly after Jayden’s outburst, when she returns to her room to find the birthday cards Marcus had encouraged everyone to make, light made literal in candles aglow, the first genuinely warm smile creeping upon Jayden’s face. It feels like a milestone. And then reality strikes: Jayden takes off running. Yet it’s only when Grace follows her all the way through town, to her dad’s empty house and back, that Jade tells the story about the shark and the octopus, her fictionalized story of abuse. It’s emotionally harrowing to listen to, and the way Cretton keeps the camera at an angle, just barely able to see Dever’s masterful performance of pain, makes it hurt all the more. This is a moment only made possible by Grace and her coworkers working tirelessly to build community for those whose communities have failed them.
Dever’s performance elevates what was doubtless already a powerful scene on the page, a microcosm of the impact that the strikingly talented cast of Short Term 12 has on the material . Much has been made in the last twelve years about the film as a time capsule of rising talent. Larson would become Captain Marvel after winning her Oscar for Room (2015). John Gallagher, Jr. would bring his good nature to 13 Cloverfield Lane (2016)—the only man you’d ever want to be stuck underground with, truly. LaKeith Stanfield would explode out in every direction with Get Out (2017), Atlanta, and Sorry to Bother You (2018). Rami Malek would go on to win an Oscar for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury after his mesmerizing work in Mr. Robot. Even Stephanie Beatriz (Natalie), who barely has a handful of lines (but the most important one: “Not like that.”) would later become the iconic Gina in Brooklyn 99 and lend her voice to Encanto (2021).
But I keep coming back to Kaitlyn Dever. She’s one of our most versatile young actors, from ABC’s Last Man Standing to Booksmart (2019) and last year’s wordless wonder, No One Can Save You. She’s a badass who can do anything—and while so much focus (deservedly) went to Brie Larson, it’s Dever’s work that set up camp in my gut upon first watch and never left. Dever so skillfully brings emotional pain to the surface, where trauma can be seen in warm cheeks like an oncoming sunburn. And when it bubbles over, you can hear as much as see the pain. Moreover, she practically runs away with the film with her perfectly-timed wisecracks at Grace, my favorite of which is, “I’ll try to leave out the part about you breaking into the house with a baseball bat”—followed by some heartfelt encouragement after Grace brutally beats a car windshield: “You’re going to be a really good mom.”
Jayden is only able to finally share her story of abuse because Grace refuses to give up on her. And it’s only because Jayden sticks with Grace, as when she encourages her to bash in that car windshield instead of murdering someone, that she’s emboldened to finally see a therapist. What I love is that Cretton knows a happy ending isn’t the true North. What we really want is to not feel alone. Every high in this film—the first time Jayden genuinely smiles, the adorable impromptu proposal Mason gives Grace—is followed by a sobering return to a broken, shattered reality. Grace, even after several sessions, hasn’t given her therapist anything to work with. But it’s a step, however small, in the direction she was never sure she’d get to. It’s what makes that final shot, Mason and Grace at their child’s sonogram, overwhelmed by the sound of their baby boy’s heartbeat, such a deep hit. Grace has spent so much of her life as a hollowed-out person determined not to let the same happen to others. It’s only through her encounters at this group home, and having someone who understands her like Mason, that she’s able to allow growth within herself again.
Towards the end of Short Term 12, Grace finally sees a therapist. In the script, it’s a drawn-out experience, pages and pages of dialogue as Grace works through her own compartmentalized trauma. But what Cretton decides to show instead feels more honest: a woman who’s been to four straight sessions without sharing anything, a woman who’s spent nearly 20 years of her life holding onto pain. What gives us hope, interestingly, isn’t seeing Grace have a breakthrough. Rather, it’s seeing her understand that routines are what save us. It’s only through the predictability, the balm of consistency, that a place feels secure enough for the most incremental of growth to occur. The hardest and most sturdy of infrastructure for these kids comes from the flesh—from the brain, the heart, and the body that shows up and tries, day after day after day.
***
One of the more heartbreaking moments in my life came just as I told my teacher mentor about the group home where I was working. I had interned in her classroom and respected her in a way even a pedestal couldn’t do justice. She also knew the lives of group home students all too well, having fostered children throughout her life. When I told her about the company I was working for, she, a woman of great economy, only had one response: I think you should quit working there. I remember feeling like half my insides had fallen off a cliff. How could there possibly be anything wrong with helping out these children who had very little semblance of community? They’re for-profit. There was no way. I told her, again and again, that I was quite sure they were non-profit. But I only told her this because I needed it to be true.
I went home that night and scoured their website. Mission statements. Media posts. My chest caving in a little further with each click. There was nothing to be found. Pennies were being pinched and dollars squeezed over the lives of those with no say in it. I found myself striding with rage, like I had blown a hole in some conspiracy I had never meant to find. But now? I think back to my manager and all the times we had to hear ‘no’ over things that, in retrospect, I realize she desperately wished she could say yes to. She had to be the bad guy so the bad guy didn’t have to be one. She had to endure the grey hairs and sleepless nights and the stress of how to make it all work so someone else above her could breathe easier at the system they were enabling. Community doesn’t always look like a circle, singing together in unison. Community sometimes looks like soft lights through a dense fog; you’re squinting your way through it all, grateful for the warmth of being seen by someone else. And that’s all we want. To be seen in the sun, warts and trauma and all. We want you to see it so you know what it’s like.
When the department I had spent seven years teaching in—the first true community I felt deeply loyal to—was disassembled and spread across a wider campus, I decided I could only truly change things at the administrative level. So I went back to school and got a second Master’s, in Educational Leadership. I expected to find answers. I anticipated building a flashlight I could finally shine on all the organizational and leadership mistakes I had endured. But what I didn’t anticipate is just how much the people I pushed up against were once like me. From there, every decision I bristled against I found a way to see the other side of. They flip-flopped on decisions because they had to serve more than one directive. They kept students we couldn’t meet the needs of because they knew there were no other good options. I didn’t always like it or agree with it. But at least I could understand it.
So what hits me the hardest now, more than a decade after first seeing Short Term 12, is the fight between Grace and her manager, Joe. Grace is apoplectic at Joe for allowing Jayden to be released back to her abusive father’s home. “What the fuck did they teach you guys in grad school?” she sneers. Jack sits back. He’s probably heard this before—likely even wondered the same before. And that’s the thing about grad school: they don’t prepare you for the worst parts. Because if they did, many of us might quit before we make it out the door. They can only show you how alike we are, all striving to do the best for the children we work with.
“I realize you’re upset, Grace,” he says, “but yelling at me isn’t an effective form of communication.” Watching this again, it doesn’t feel like Jack is saying this to admonish her. He’s trying to show her that the world from here on out won’t listen once the yelling begins. Jack probably yelled at a lot of people back in the day, quaking with fury. But it didn’t change anything. He probably went back to school, thinking he could get that degree that elevated him to a level where he could really make a difference. He assures Grace that, if he had the choice, he’d hunt down every one of those absent, abusive parents himself. But he’s been there too long. He’s learned the hardest lesson of all—that the only way to survive is to let go. To accept that there are things you can and cannot change, and to hold tight to whatever wisdom helps you discern the difference. And that space of lack, of not feeling like you’re doing enough? Only community can fill it.
***
One late May, after years of grinding as a teacher, a confluence of end-of-year events—returning students visiting teachers, a high school, an awards ceremony—had me deeply reflective. I’d just ticked off the last chunks of paperwork for the year, the kind of paperwork no students ever see and which seemingly exists mostly for administration to have something to do. None of it seemed to matter. Assessments with my students, who had weathered trauma, severe language deprivation, and other factors beyond our control, had shown incremental—if any—growth. What was this all amounting to? What difference, I wondered, was I really making?
Only a few months later, I’d walk down the hallway and see those same students, now in a new class, holding their hands out for a high five. They were so stoked to see me, like I was some goddamn rock star. This continued every single time I saw them in the hall, all year long and the years after, when I wasn’t even their teacher. That meant far, far more than any state assessment or successful IEP goal. That hit me in the chest, where the warmth makes it feel almost elemental, like tapping into a core truth meant to be discovered.
For some of these kids, absence leads to appreciation, and a small win to you might seem monumental to them. Short Term 12 reminds me how vital it is to create a safety net for the people who’ve been failed on every trust fall they’ve been forced to take. So you show up day after day, drawing after drawing, joke after joke. You allow yourself to be the target, to be yelled, hit, and spit at. You stay there, refusing to leave, because every kid needs a champion, and by god, you are not going to bail on this.
The ending of Short Term 12 channels everything I most love about the movie—and about what it means to become a community for those without one—into a familiar cycle. Change seems iterative, but iteration requires a step forward. Just as he did at the beginning of the film, Mason is telling a story. The film tricks us into thinking he’s talking about someone new, but he’s actually talking about the same Marcus we’ve been rooting for the whole time. We watch as a group of people truly, deeply celebrate the small wins they’ve hoped for but long ago learned not to expect. And then, as it always does in Short Term 12, something happens: Big Red takes off running. “Here we go,” says Grace as they all give chase.
There’s no better ethos I can think of. Here we go again, providing that safety net, that wall to push and punch and lean against. Here we go, believing in all those who haven’t been believed in enough. Here we go, indeed.