Bob (Slater) feels trapped in his boring office job, bullied by his boss (Jones), ignored by his back-stabbing colleagues and scowled at by his neighbours. He daydreams about going on a shooting spree, but when another employee beats him to the punch, he saves the day and becomes an accidental hero. Suddenly he's a local celebrity, promoted by the company owner (Macy) and noticed by the "nice" girl (Cuthbert) whose life he saved. People even want him to run for mayor! But under the surface, no one is who they appear to be.

This is a dry and very sharp look at perceptions and the superficiality of our society. As the once-invisible Bob suddenly has the respect of everyone around him, for all the wrong reasons, the film is able to dig under the surface of a culture in which everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame and people are inanely fascinated by stories of ordinary heroism, even if it's a media invention. As the story builds, it's impossible to predict what will happen next.

And the cast grabs hold of the script, toying with the offbeat characters and gleefully pushing them into extremely black places. Slater is superb as the bland nobody who really doesn't want to be notorious; he just wants his life to be a bit more bearable. But when he ends up with a cushy job and the woman of his dreams, everything is still wrong. Cuthbert is hilariously jagged as a woman who wishes she had died, and takes out her anger on anyone near her. And Macy nails the slick vacuity dead-on.

Writer-director Cappello takes a stylised visual approach, using lots of simple effects, playing with colour, light and film speed. Even so, the film is extremely scruffy: it looks like a low-budget indie. So it's up to the actors and story to draw us in, which they both do cleverly. As it progresses, the film gets sweet and nasty, and also fairly creepy. But that's mainly because we recognise our own attitudes everywhere.

themes, language, violence

11.Oct.07