Spoiled

With a 28 second opening shot of a breakfast bowl being filled up with Nutri-Grain followed by a flatmates looking on aghast at some unseen horror in slow motion, we are well over a minute into the film yet the tone has been set in stone that we will be looking at a domestic slice of life.

Is it fair for me to kick this review off with a rambling description of the opening 60 seconds? Possibly not, but my point is that you can't really afford to take an age in getting your film going in 48 Hours. The facial expressions may have been humorous but by setting it in a standard apartment with standard characters other than the 'bad' flatmate you will typically need to have some really engaging subject matter to stand above the pack.

But I still had my fingers crossed until the first dialogue for the film to set the tone of the plot was a sit around flat meeting where at times the characters talked over each other and just complained. With no backstory to any of these men, no defining physical attributes with plain coloured clothes and just sitting around, and by starting with negative rants it did anything but get me on their side.

However, this was a tricky genre so I was still on board to give this a chance if you developed a narrative where something or someone ideally redeemed themselves. Yet instead the 'bad boy' (he's got a leather jacket like a rebel without a cause) committed such heinous crimes as eating chocolate from the fridge and then putting it back, with nobody actually clarifying if he had stolen it or just chose to put it back in the fridge when he was done.

This of course necessitates a heart to heart talk. Is the brave dogooder flatmate who is going to talk some sense into him putting his hand on the troublemaker's thigh supposed to be funny? Some weird attempt at subversion? Because it's minor but you walked a fine line and it felt like you were trying to get a laugh from 2 men touching each other? I hope I'm wrong of course because there was literally nothing wrong there.

The ending also caused me issues. After being called out for his so called apalling behaviour, the bad boy looks inside himself simply does make the change to being tidy and wearing plain white t-shirts. Sorry guys but I'll take the interesting flawed character over the collective of nondescript normies any day of the week. Felt like watching conversion therapy to be honest.

The positives for me were your nicely framed camerawork and good use of natural lighting, for the most part, with the bedroom talk scene being not quite as well covered as the rest of the film.

Story: 1/5
Technical: 2/5
Elements: 1/5
Overall: 1/5