Millennial apology fantasy: A forgiving twist in the tale

In film after film, over the past two years — from movies set in the multiverse, to animation capers and films about future worlds under threat from robots — parents are apologising to their children, acknowledging inter-generational trauma, opening a door to healing. Those ’90s children, raised in new family formats, amid a host of new parenting skills, in a fast-changing world, would come to be called millennials. “As millennials became parents in the last decade, they brought with them a wave of newly compassionate and conscious parenting,” says Sukriti Das, a clinical psychologist and learning and development head at the online therapy platform Betterlyf. “Nuclear families have been around long enough for them to be able to introspect, identify elements of intergenerational trauma that they wish to break the cycle on.” And so, in Encanto and Everything Everywhere…, the cycle is broken on the intergenerational trauma of unrealistic expectations such as magical levels of talent, perfection in behaviour and appearance, a child that will unfailingly mirror the parent. “A graceful, unconditional apology by a parent helps the child open their eyes and see that there is more complexity to the parent’s story than they perceived,” says Deepanjana Pal, writer, podcaster, cultural critic and managing editor at Film Companion.