From Omeleto.
A woman mistrusts her neighbors.
THE BUYERS is used with permission from Felicia Manning. Learn more at https://feliciamanning.com.
Adriana is a wife and mother who has recently moved into a new home with her children and husband. While her husband is away for work, she is left to unpack and settle into the new home, and it’s a stressful experience since everything has been essentially "shoved into a box" by movers.
Her new neighbors, Carol and Felix, come by to introduce themselves. They’re eager to help — almost off-puttingly so — but Adriana turns them down. Yet Carol and Felix persist in being neighborly, to the point of being intrusive and offensive. When Adriana tries to banish them off her property altogether, it ignites a confrontation that spins out of control.
Directed by Felicia Manning and written by Samantha Wilson, this sharp and acerbic short film looks like a dark comedy on the surface, riffing on the idea of oddball neighbors who can’t seem to pick up on the clues that they’re not wanted. It opens with a sense of warm, almost cozy aspiration, capturing Adriana’s picture-perfect new neighborhood and home in burnished, polished cinematography. Though her family’s belongings are in boxes and Adriana is stressing about having to suddenly move and settle into a new home, we can see how solidly upper-middle-class everything is and how much the family and home epitomize the suburban dream.
Yet as it progresses, the sturdy, well-paced storytelling turns steely and darkly eccentric, beginning with the entrance of Carol and Jack. They are introduced as a set of daffy, almost hapless older neighbors, tone-deaf and clueless but eager to be neighborly. Though Adriana rebuffs them out of politeness, they keep coming back, and each reappearance ratchets up their oddness to increasingly ominous levels, becoming alarmingly intrusive and trampling any conventional boundaries. This progression is matched by a clever shift in the visual language, as camera movements get more disruptive and framings get more skewed.
What emerges is a segue into something like a home-invasion thriller combined with horror, a shift matched in the overall cast’s performances. While actor Marissa Pistone is the relatable emotional center of the film as a middle-class mom trying to keep herself and her children safe, actors Michele Karpel and Will Roberts get progressively unhinged and sinister, their descent precisely calibrated. They become truly menacing as they forcibly occupy Adriana’s new home, much to the new homeowner’s alarm.
THE BUYERS builds tension and suspense in its final section, culminating in a confrontation that foregrounds the film’s themes, which don’t just emerge but ring out with force. It grounds a tautly crafted, darkly entertaining narrative in a larger examination of class disparities and resentment and the gap between the haves and have-nots. Though the story is resolutely contemporary, using a cut-throat, expensive and competitive real estate market as the backdrop, the way that privilege isolates and marginalizes its collateral damage is an old story The film ends with something of a cliffhanger, but in a sense, it reflects its moral ambiguity, unsure of who is the "bad guy" and who isn’t.
