The Happy Man

I found this film to be a big mess of incoherent ideas and poorly filmed, looks like on a phone and you were unable to get the picture straight, the top of the guys head was frequently cut off. Aside from that you seem to completely misunderstand the groundhog day concept-the proper way it goes is that the same day happens over and over again and the central character is the only one who knows, everyone else is just carrying on from the previous day. Then the conclusion looked like he was the subject of an experiment, not a bad idea when there's time to reveal such a mystery but it just stopped there leaving no answers. I'm doing a lot of reviews and find that 1 ratings are extremely rare, everyone seems to want to give a 2 star minimum as in "good on you for having a go." So I'm guessing if many others come by to review you'll get a lot of 2 star ratings. Sorry for tearing you to shreds, I suspect you probably realise you didn't cover yourself in glory here. I still admire anyone who enters into this, clearly things went wrong here (noticed the disqualification) but keep having a go, you can only get better.

Whilst this film didn't necessarily conform to the classic 'groundhog day' structure, I found the take on the time travel element interesting. The story of an almost psychotically happy man waking up every day to go to an awful job (selling dodgy credit cards), to slowly realise throughout the day that his life is terrible. He then goes to bed upset, only to wake up in a state of frightening happiness as if the previous day hadn't happened. As revealed at the end, it turns out the 'happy man' is a clone. Every night the credit card company kills the clone. This is because over the day it has become disenfranchised and upset with it's existence, and the company replaces it with a fresh one. It was a good commentary on the mundane work life many of us lead, and the disposable nature of low skill workers. The shots were deeply inconsistent, the colour grading was poor (looks like iso issues with the darker shots), the sound was jarring and the dialogue was very forced. The moment the protagonist thinks he's in a 'time loop' is shoehorned in. The concept however is really interesting, my main issue was how clearly it was conveyed- the story deserves a longer film.

Selling credit door to door is met with mixed reaction, Stuck in a time loop our exceptionally happy man gets a visit in the night, I had many questions, why is this happy man smiling so much, is he a human, how does this time loop work? I think by the end of the film I had more questions that answers and felt like your team tackled a story that was too complicated for a short film on a no budget. Good effort embracing the genre as Time travel is no easy genre, we have had it in the comp many times and it often requires careful storytelling to make sense to the audience. My advice if you do the comp next year - I would say write it much simpler and concentrate on bringing the audience along with you for each story beat.