The Off Hours

"When did you get so sad?"

The Off Hours is a low-budget independently-made film that seeks to explore the twilight world of a night shift waitress at a truck stop. Indie stalwart Amy Seimetz (The Myth of the American Sleepover, Wristcutters: A Love Story) plays said waitress Francine, an aimless twenty-something who finds herself treading water in one of life's cul-de-sacs (sorry, bit of a mixed metaphor there). When she isn't earning a minimal wage in her depressingly low-key job she's hanging out with a band of no-hopers, but a budding relationship with an unlikely truck driver starts to challenge her status quo, and she begins to come to a realisation that her life is going nowhere.

Writer-director Megan Griffiths helms this digi-indie mumblecore effort with an unshowy confidence. She uses the 'world of the night shift' to explore ideas relating to people who've become out of sync with the waking world, and what this could do to a person in both the long and short term. At Francine's highway diner there are a collection of disparate characters all searching for direction; the curmudgeonly owner/short-order cook, the surly slavic woman, the truck driver who used to be a banker, Francine's slacker friends... these people are in the midst of awkwardly trying to feel each other out and discovering the boundaries of the space in which they operate. It's all a bit sombre and slightly melodramatic, but it's also understated enough to maintain a certain edge of realism that 'bigger' films would give their left nut to achieve.

According to wikipedia and some of the spin around The Off Hours, this is the first film to recieve an SSF tag. This doesn't really reflect on the quality of the film, but I think it can be seen as an extension of where it's coming from. The use of prefabricated (secondhand) materials could be viewed to be as much a stylistic decision as it is an environmentally-conscious one, as it links in with the aforementioned realism. I will say that this isn't a fast-paced film, it might even be fair to say that it doesn't have any pacing at all as the film isn't concerned with plot. The Off Hours is about character and environment. The quiet slowness of the film perfectly captures the tone of the small hours experienced in the world of the night shift worker, it's not really the sort of thing that films normally get made about, so I appreciated the way it achieves a very particular atmosphere and uses this to look at wider questions relating to the human condition.

DIRECTOR: Megan Griffiths
WRITER/SOURCE: Megan Griffiths
KEY ACTORS: Amy Seitmetz, Ross Partridge, Tony Doupe, Scoot McNairy, Gergana Mellin

RELATED TEXTS:
- Megan Griffiths previously wrote and directed First Aid for Choking, and is currently finishing off the film Eden. She also made the short films Eros and Moving.
- I found some stylistic similarity with the film Frozen River (mainly in the camera work). See also other indie films such Wendy and Lucy, Cold Weather and Hannah Takes the Stairs.