Cruise

The room is carefully re-dressed. The chair put back, the tickets replaced. The skirt on the plastic hula dancer is stilled. The body being removed from the office more so. The floor is swept for dust, brass. A chair comes back. It might be the same one, warm with fear.

The mechanisms aren't that modern. There's a seven segment display, red on black in a locked box. Counts down from three to zero. It's a plastic beige box, a standard cabinet lock on the bottom corner. There's a warning label, much as one might find on a tachygraph or electrical cabinet. A loud buzzer, a tone as insistent as the rush through the ears. Rules written in blood, danger of death. There's mention of email, but no computers. It's tone dialling, not IP. Not even a headset, nothing to spoil the aim. A handset, buttons with letters, grey in a sea of shadows. A small notepad for taking details. What colour is the ink in the pen?

The danger of death is manifest, anthropomorphic. Black leather jacket, black shirt, black tie, black polished boots, a black folder of rules to be consulted when the black phone, well, that would be telling. The black steel of the pistol speaks loudly enough.

The rules are clear. As bright and as bold as the phone book whose yellow pages very carefully approach but do not connect to those of a particular brand identity. The shelves are not. Lined with boxes, or documents, or something. How many times have those coveralls obscured them and removed the still warm trail of a fatal transfer of kinetic energy from their textured plastic surface? How long has this been going on? Where is this room? This place?

It doesn't matter.

How did they get here? Pulse, dialling. Fingers, tapping. The clock ticks in its little life ring. There's mention of a particular card game but it's clear who holds them all. Not what they say. That's less a question of absolutes than relativity, perspective.

We're in one room, Peter Schnobb's lensing working well within the confines of a tiny space where the shooting is all across and along and at arm's reach. These are necessarily small performances, some voices, a mark, a Jake, an executioner. The janitors have done this before, it's in the nod, the gestures. That body language, the lack of language around bodies, raises more questions, but they don't matter. Much as a rising one indicates a query, this is a film all about tone. Claustrophobic, the beige of office walls a quicksand.

Sam Rudykoff's film adds to a canon of telephone terrors, from Phone Booth to Sorry To Bother You and beyond. Here in a cell phone calls are made with a simple aim; two, one knows, if one counts the gap between muzzle and forehead. Give away a cruise. Free makes it a bargain. In comparison to what, with whom, these are questions that will be left unanswered. Unlike the telephones.

Cruise screened as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.