Available on DVD from Mon 10 Mar

Destin Cretton / USA / 2013 / 96 mins

Many families believe the government isn’t doing enough to help with the spiralling costs of childcare, which have increased by nineteen percent since 2013. But what about those whose parents cannot look after their offspring? Adapted from a short film of the same name, writer/director Destin Cretton addresses the subject of those children who are pushed to the extremities of society.

Twenty-something Grace (Brie Larson) is a supervisor at a temporary care home for teenagers with troubled backgrounds, working alongside her long-term boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.). Although she has a profusion of contact time with the children, her medical opinion is not recognised by the manager because her primary role is to provide a safe environment.

The tempestuous setting for Cretton’s narrative, teeming with volatile emotions, could have easily have lead to the film becoming bogged down in the tormented anguish of each character. Instead, while Cretton undeniably includes frequent plaintive and tender moments, he keeps the atmosphere light by segmenting in scenes of joyous, free-flowing gregariousness. A whirligig of emotions that mirrors the highs and lows of the intimate profession.

Larson’s Grace is effortlessly benevolent, instinctively pragmatic and fiercely protective, but Cretton reveals through repeated images of her washing (away her stress) and nervously scratching her cuticles, that although she displays a maternal facade of strictness and kindness to the children, she’s secretly straining under the weight of an unplanned pregnancy and an abusive father. Although Grace is deft at caring for her charges, Gallacher’s bubbly and dependent Mason, begging Grace to let him in on her thoughts, demonstrates how she struggles in letting herself be cared for.

This exposure of Grace’s fragility parallels her with the kids she cares for, demolishing the “us and them” divide and showing instead their similarities. Just because somebody grows in age, it doesn’t mean their problems or their capability to manage them, have at all improved.