Parents' Guide to The Same Storm

But Director Peter Hedges succeeds at the challenging task of creating a compelling narrative through Zoom and similar technology. The Same Storm offers a series of gripping stories, each of which could be its own film. They run the gamut from a broken White family grappling with Trumpism to a Black father, a police officer, who wants his daughter to think twice about joining a rally against police in the wake of George Floyd. Other stories center around a family hoping to help their son who struggles with mental illness, a daughter trying to reconnect with her mother, and a son trying to help his mother through their shared loss.

Probably the only critique is one that doesn't apply to the film itself, but more to the state of the United States at the time the film was made. Because one of the big issues of the time revolved around Floyd's death at the hands of police, the movie's Black characters -- even when they're shown in situations that don't concern racial identity -- all have to grapple with the reality of being Black in America in at least one of their storylines. It's a sad indictment of a country that can't let Black people freely express their humanity without having to wrestle with their racial identity as part of an exploitative and violent system. But, to be fair, a White family grappling with Trumpism is also symbolic of the times; to be racialized is to be political, and the message of that story is to be aware of the existence of racial privilege and how it begets the violence that leads to a situation like Floyd's. Overall, The Same Storm can at times feel more like an anthology of tales rather than a cohesive plot, but the stories being told are all important views of what it means to be human.