Theo Brannigan

A pilot has two jobs, introduce a world and make you need episode two, and this does both without a single scene of people explaining the world to each other. The funeral tea is a lesson in blocking. Nine speaking parts in one room and I could draw you the map of it afterwards. I want the rest of this.

I have been trying to write a fourteen minute comedy for two years now, and this is the one I keep going back to as proof that it can be done at all. The whole thing turns on a man not looking up from a clipboard. Six words of dialogue in the last minute and one of them is sorry. I would put it in front of anybody who still thinks short comedy has to be a sketch.

I put this on for a teenager who was waiting for his mother at the desk and he watched the whole thing standing up with his coat on. That is the review. It is very funny and it is kind to everybody in it, including the manager, which almost never happens in a film about a bad job.

Charming, well made, and about eleven percent slighter than it thinks it is. Brannigan writes dialogue that actors clearly love to say, and the boy is a real find. But the film reaches for a bigger ending than it has built room for. The shop closes, the mood turns, and I did not believe the turn. I laughed a great deal on the way there.

The joke I keep repeating to people is the one about the shoes, and I have ruined it every time, which is how you know it is built properly. Fourteen minutes, one Saturday, one boy who wants to be taken seriously by a man who cannot be bothered to take anything seriously. The last exchange lands so lightly you almost miss that it is the whole point of the film.