Waydowntown

Shot in jittery, supersaturated digital video, Gary Burn's waydowntown infuses the nine-to-five ritual with a palliative pharmaceutical rush, channeling the endemic coffee-addled buzz and narcotized haze into an hallucinogenic waking life.

The film transpires over day 24 of a contest between Calgary co-workers to see who can stay indoors the longest within the city's massive downtown walkway system. The competitors - whose actual occupations remain a mystery - are reaching their breaking points. Twentysomething Tom (Fabrizio Filippo), a snide trainee with a superhero fixation, keeps spotting a caped crusader out of the corner of his eye. Go-getter Sandra (Marya Delver), lightheaded from the re-circulated air, obsessively clutches a tear-out perfume sampler to her nose. Tom's cublicle-mate, lifer schlubBradley (Don McKellar), is left out of the bet but seems to be contemplating a final wager with himself.

Burns renders Calgary's glass-enclosed complex as a giant vacuum: vast, anonymous, and stifling. A dark edge of claustrophobic crisis marks even casual encounters - Tom's ambivalent flirtation with vampy mallrat (Tammy Isbell) is punctuated by her abrupt retreat into soundproof booth for a cleansing holler. With wit and empathy to spare, waydowntown acknowledges the silent screams of workaday inertia but stops short of indulging its characters' striving solipsism. Nothing here is the end of the world, just the close of another squandered day.