From Omeleto.
A man won’t leave the bathroom.
BATHROOM BREAK is used with permission from Dave Canning. Learn more at https://davecanning.com.
Ben is at his job on the morning of an important meeting. But he’s not in the meeting, though he’s supposed to be. He’s in the bathroom, and he won’t leave.
His co-workers entreat him to join them, but Ben is caught up in some personal crisis and refuses to come out of the stall. At first, his co-workers try to be conciliatory and reason with him, but Ben proves intransigent. As the meeting approaches, they become unreasonably desperate and put more pressure on Ben, leading to a confrontation that soon takes on epic proportions.
Directed and written by Dave Canning, this sly, subversive short comedy seems like a workaday narrative about the dehumanizing effect of corporate life on one’s spirit and soul. As it begins, it exists within the registers of naturalistic realism, with darkly gleaming visual surfaces and lights and its deceptive quiet tenor in the storytelling, though the drones of throat singing in the score add an unusual, slightly uneasy dimension. But while the story stays true to its thematic concerns, it turns towards a more wry and surreal direction, making for a memorable exploration of work, office life and personal freedom.
The storytelling is briskly paced, but minimal with detail and specifics. While we’re introduced to Ben having some sort of crisis in a bathroom stall, we get little information about what happened, why he’s spiraling or even what his role is in the company. We learn he has a spouse and child, but we don’t even know much about his company, only that he’s needed at an important meeting. Though actor Tobias Siegel plays Ben’s pain as grounded and real, the dearth of narrative detail focuses less on Ben as a character and more as a malfunctioning cog in what had been a smoothly functioning corporate machine.
That machinery mobilizes quickly when Ben refuses to leave the bathroom. Led by actors Russell G. Jones and Catherine Curtin as strong, blustering company enforcers, the group of Ben’s co-workers seems timid at first in dealing with Ben, but soon ratchets up the force to a surprisingly ferocious and bitingly angry level. They become an implacable force in trying to get Ben to meet their demands, and soon resort to an unusual tool to coerce this compliance, one that firmly pulls the film into darkly absurdist territory.
Ben finds his own equally absurd solution to his crisis and dilemma, one that is funny, memorable and highly symbolic of his future at the company, and perhaps even of his career. But even as his corporate and career fate is uncertain, his existential one is one of liberation, and it turns BATHROOM BREAK into a fable or even a fairytale of sorts. Its pointed dearth of detail becomes a space where we can project ourselves, imagining ourselves liberated from the machinery that structures our own lives.
