We’re only minutes into The Fallout before the carefree world of 16-year old Vada (Jenna Ortega in a star-making role) is turned upside down by a school shooting. Up to that point, her biggest concerns were nagging parents, knowing the answers to an upcoming quiz, and which flavor cake-pop to get at the Starbucks drive through. When her doting little sister Amelia (Lumi Pollack) texts her “911” (she’s gotten her first period and needs to be talked off a ledge), Vada goes to the bathroom to provide some much-needed sisterly advice. She’ll remain trapped there, with popular girl Mia (Maddie Ziegler), when gunshots start ripping off in the hall outside, accompanied by piercing screams of abject terror.

The violence remains almost entirely offscreen as Vada and Mia hole up in a shared stall and shelter for their lives, the only instance of gore when fellow student Quinton (Niles Fitch) darts into the lady’s room to hide from the active shooter, his shirt stained with the blood of his fallen brother. After the incident, that blood has seeped into the pores of Vada, Mia, Quinton, and the rest of their classmates, all of whom struggle to find a path forward. Some, like friend Nick (Will Ropp) turn to activism while others, like Vada, are numbed by the experience. Short-circuited from the trauma and asking existential questions about why she survived when others did not (a launching pad for her developing nihilism), Vada loses the spark that once defined her but discovers a newfound bond with Mia. This phenomenon is not rare: forging a bond with someone you’ve gone through a trauma with can be a healthy avenue to move beyond an event like a school shooting because it allows you to connect with someone when the rest of the world feels so out to sea, unable to comprehend the lingering feelings of fear, doubt, and prevailing numbness. For Vada, her friendship Mia becomes a hideaway from reality. The two laze by Mia’s pool, drink expensive bottles of Mia’s rich dads’ wine, try marijuana for the first time (before moving onto harder substances) and bond over their inability to move past the inciting event, which is often spoken about in monosyllabic texts.

The Fallout does a great work of demonstrating how in six short minutes, a teen with a gun can not only rob an incomprehensible amount of young lives but also transform survivors like Vada, rearranging the circuitry of her brain away from the frivolity of youth and towards an anxious, depressive state. It’s remarkable that this is actress-turned-writer-director Megan Park’s debut film (she has churned out a number of shorts however). The maturity and urgency with which she executes her film, its awe-striking ability to weigh deep pathos against genuinely funny beats, feels like the work of someone who’s been sharpening their skill for ages. Her star is just beginning to rise. Pay attention.

As a screenwriter, Park’s flow is articulate and emotionally honest while her work behind the camera proves a masterful hand at eliciting striking performances and staging visual striking scenes in their own right. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the most urgent and piercing debuts in quite some time and, in some sense, does for school shootings what Promising Young Woman did for sexual assault, using a poppy audio-visual aesthetic to speak to the horrors of long-standing societal wrongs.

This feels like perhaps the most defining films about school shootings in Gen-Z because it asks big questions from the perspective of those experiencing them, chief among them: how on earth do we expect students to return to a place of unspeakable horror to carry on learning when they’ve seen the corpses of their fellow students littering these very same halls? For too long, these debates have been framed by outside parties, sidelined by unintelligible arguments over gun rights, battled between aged politicians offering their useless thoughts and prayers. But the POV of The Fallout comes from within the storm and, in doing so, feels so much more fresh and vital.

Carrying the burden of these questions is Vada and Jenna Ortega delivers a knock-out of a performance as the troubled protagonist. In Vada’s confusion, Ortega offers clarity, defining a character who is equal parts mess and muscular; battling the insecurities and confusing consequences of surviving tragedy, pushing her family away, turning to drugs and alcohol, waging war within herself. Ortega’s turn is equal parts heartbreaking and explosively funny with a scene where she tries E at school – a moment where it’s impossible to not draw similarities with HBO Gen-Z teen drama Euphoria – that absolutely brings down the house. Ortega is matched by a strong system of young supporting leads in Maddie Ziegler and Niles Fitch and an absolutely aces adult cast that includes John Ortiz, Julie Bowen and Shailene Woodley. Through the fog of calamity, they remain clear-eyed characters even as they struggle with weighty issues, face crises of the utmost severity, and end up with no easy answers. This epidemic is a cycle, and one that has yet to end. The Fallout dares to ask: what the fuck are we gonna do about it?

CONCLUSION: A vital work that puts the school shooter epidemic into focus, ‘The Fallout’ is an audacious, explosive debut from writer-director Megan Park that makes way for a remarkable performance from Jenna Ortega. Heart-pounding, honest, and at times even hysterical, this is the very best of SXSW’s narrative feature competition.