From Omeleto.
A man finds a romantic connection.
A MATTER OF CHOICE is used with permission from Louis Norton Selzer. Learn more at https://louisnortonselzer.com.
Dryston is in the waiting room of a euthanasia clinic, watching the other characters in the room as he waits to be called for the procedure. But then he encounters a woman named Mallory, and they start a conversation.
Despite the strained oddness of the setting, they find a rapport together — one that blossoms quickly into a genuine connection, and surprisingly, a romantic attraction. Just when both have reached the end of their existential rope, they face a choice on whether or not to act upon it — or keep to their present course.
Directed and written by Louis Norton Selzer, this uniquely realized short blends dark comedy and romance with a slyly earnest existential undercurrent. Eschewing realism for a stylized absurdity and shot with a cool yet gleaming sense of light and color that can veer from bleak to luminous, the film takes some time to build up the atmosphere of the waiting room as a microcosm of Kafkaesque stasis and bleak humanity. Yet there’s a dark, surreal humor in how, even in this final port of call, there are still nonsensical procedures, angry or weird bystanders, officious bureaucracy and the deadening surfaces of civility masking the raw despair and sorrow of the people waiting.
Amid this emotional hothouse, Dryston and Mallory manage to strike up a conversation, even finding a rapport over their shared hatred of poetry and their suitcases as they watch the other patients go before them. As they share this last time, they find themselves resonating with each other. This miracle is accomplished less by the pared-down, dryly witty dialogue and more by the understated yet honest performances by actors Will Merrick and Lydia Wilson, who convey not just Drystan and Mallory’s profound depression but the dawning that they’ve found someone empathetic and understanding in the place they least expected it.
The narrative momentum then builds to a point: will their meeting change the course of their decision? In a more conventional film, we’d expect a rush into the proverbial sunset, both lovers hand-in-hand. But A MATTER OF CHOICE is not a conventional film, but one that takes a surreal, heightened approach to difficult questions of existence and how hard it is to be a human being. In its own way, it looks at how and why people make seemingly unthinkable decisions, and how we never truly know what baggage people are carrying. It acknowledges that much of life can feel overwhelmingly painful and depressing, and humans can and will do anything to feel hope — even in the most counter-intuitive ways and in the bleakest of places.
