The lady who reveals up at Paul’s door is labeled “The Customer” within the credit, giving her a semi-supernatural connotation, though she is clearly flesh and blood, shivering and dripping moist. Jordan Cowan’s Customer is mercurial, complicated, flickering with impulses and responses, some recognizable, others not a lot. Paul lives in a dingy trailer in what seems to be the center of nowhere. How this barefoot girl even acquired to him at such a late hour just isn’t defined. Her story—she fell asleep on the seashore and was strolling “dwelling”—does not make sense. When she tells the story once more, particulars change. She is clearly mendacity. Paul is first seen alone, a stolid mass of a person, soggy with feeling (though what he is feeling is tougher to call), sitting at his tiny desk, listening to the storm scream towards the skinny partitions. One thing may be very very incorrect even earlier than the Customer reveals up.
The lady’s total demeanor is inconsistent along with her circumstances. She tries to place a courageous face on issues. She asks if he may give her a carry into city. He retains telling her they will have to attend till the storm passes. He suggests she permits her garments to dry, he makes some tea, he suggests a sizzling bathe, he makes her some soup. The shadows are so darkish, the storm is so loud, the creaks and drips and howls within the air make abnormal kindness appear sinister. What’s he as much as? However every part is so unstable you surprise what she is as much as as effectively. He talks rather a lot, however it’s not small-talk. He strikes like he is underwater, and his ideas are equally sluggish and deliberate. He drones on about worry and paranoia, sleep vs. no sleep, and she or he listens, typically alert to purple flags of potential hazard, however typically getting sucked into his rhythms. The Customer is unusually snug on this eerie surroundings, peering on the objects and trinkets he has mendacity round, brazenly snooping. The shadows are thick and impenetrable, much more so when the ability goes out.
Bell wrote the extraordinary screenplay. There are solely two characters within the movie, and there is quite a lot of dialogue. Paul is caught up in his personal darkish insomniac imaginings, terror at what may be outdoors making an attempt to get in. There’s one thing hypnotic about his voice. The Customer listens along with her nerve endings. She needs to go away. However she stays.
The tempo is sluggish, and the sound design is oppressive: the howls of wind, the dripping, groaning pipes, flooring and chairs creaking, all of which typically sound like human voices in agony. Maxx Corkindale’s cinematography, mixed with the set design, is a moody gloomy masterpiece. The colour scheme is so managed—rusts and dingy golds interrupted by patches of pitch blackness—that when different colours arrive—fluorescent blues, silvers, greys—it is as alarming as a gun shot. There are occasions when the storm is so intense it kilos towards the ceiling and partitions like a wild animal. Paul and the Customer look up on the ceiling, alarmed. They each appear to be at risk. On the planet of “You will By no means Discover Me,” this will very effectively be true.