desperation

These guys don’t exist to make the girls look worse, but the way they function in the narrative provides the girls’ desperation—to live, to eat, to know the truth, to protect themselves—more nuance.

Time and again it was the reality of what Fugard called “human desperation” that inflamed his imagination.

When the hunt by the authorities to find them intensified "so their desperation increased and so did the risks and the dangers to the baby", the prosecutor said.

Yet, almost every scene is a comment on the desperation of struggling paycheck to paycheck in America.

There was no hiding the desperation any longer.