Seniors by Adam Curley is a snapshot into the lives of a family fractured by cheating. And the discovery happens during the worst possible moment, as it usually does. The wife finds out right before she and her husband are set to take their high school senior on his first college campus tour. And it’s a prime example of one parent thinking of themselves and the other putting their pain aside for their child.
From the very first couple of seconds of this short film, they set a tone of secrets, intimacy, and for the married couple in particular, dissatisfaction. But it isn’t until the wife finds out her husband is cheating on her that things turn into anger. A contained anger at that. The wife sits in the backseat of their car instead of the front, she snaps back at him when he tries to shush her while talking to her son, and she separates herself from her husband when it gets to be too much for her to act like everything’s ok.
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But the strength of Seniors is in the relationship between the mother and son. She’s obviously going through something hard. But she prioritizes her son and sets her pain aside to make sure that everything about this tour goes well. The husband tries in his own way by asking the tour guide about LGBTQ+ organizations for their son. But at the end of the day, he chose to have an affair while married, a selfish decision that hurt his wife and his son.
Despite this being only a snapshot into their lives, you can tell from the way that the son goes after the mother or how he looks for his own answers, there’s a tenderness there. He worries about his mother. And it brings up something that isn’t often acknowledged in these college comedies: the parents that get left behind. Because while the children are going off on their own new shiny adventure, the parents now have to redefine their lives outside of primarily raising a child.
MORE: Looking for more short films that have your jaw on the ground at the end? Read our review for Sundance’s Callback here!
Filming wise I really liked the opening sequence with these quick snapshots of how this family spends their mornings. It differentiates all of them while also honing in on the similarities between them. I also really liked the set design. I’ve seen that phone before and it gave me flashbacks. And I especially liked how the short didn’t shy away from the fact that, yes the son was looking at smutty material in the morning. But it wasn’t centered on the fact that “Oh, he’s jerking it to men.” Not differentiating made his experiences, even something sexual, the norm instead of the outlier.
Overall Seniors is a story about beginnings and endings intertwined with the shadow of heartaches and joy that will come when we go our separate ways.
