AWESOME | Omeleto

A woman sees the future. Joy is a woman in her twenties navigating a series of difficult relationships and dilemmas. Her pill-popping boyfriend, Aiden, can't even stay awake in her presence. Her contract at her job is up. Her dad is out of prison on parole. Joy's unique situation compounds the difficulty: she dreams about her future before it happens. That makes her feel hopeless and depressed at times, but she must find a way to use her ability to change her fate. Directed and written by Paul D'Arcy Munger, this gritty, emotionally grounded short drama is about how one woman navigates the travails of life, compounded by her own anxieties, cynicism and hopelessness. Joy can see her future, but that ability gives her a sense of fatalism and doom as she experiences her lowest points twice over. What she must discover is if she can use her ability to change her life somehow or remain mired in passivity and inaction. Joy's dilemma is an existential one, one that many of us feel: a lack of autonomy over our lives, or like fate flings us from one end to another, battering us psychologically. The storytelling -- rendered in muted, naturalistic tones and steady camerawork and compositions -- builds up the wreckage of Joy's daily life, from a dazed boyfriend, a dead-end job and a well-meaning but ineffectual father. Part of the film's conceit is Joy's direct address to the viewers as she wryly comments on her life and the relationships in it, turning us into her confidants as her life slowly falls apart. At her lowest, she buys a book about manifestation, both out of desperation and a gesture of cynical humor. But she's encouraged to speak up for something she wants, and she seems to get it -- along with a glimmer of hope that she can change the future she sees. As Joy, actor Sidney Rose White gives a tough-minded yet delicate performance; it can be challenging to make a character that has given up on life interesting, but White keeps an undercurrent of hope alive, conveying a lively intelligence protected by a self-protective cynicism. When she's inspired to actually go after and assert what she wants, that fragile flicker of hope seems to pay off -- only for her to realize that you can never account for other people's choices. Engaging and fascinating to watch play out, AWESOME is a metaphor for chronic anxiety and depression, where we project hopeless outcomes and futures in our minds and often feel ineffectual as authors of our own lives. It's hard to feel hope and take action when we feel nothing we do matters, and Joy herself isn't entirely disabused of that notion. But at the very end, she gets a vision of a future -- one that she may have to attempt to change to survive. It ends AWESOME -- designed as part of a larger narrative -- on something of a cliffhanger, but also a spark of promise that Joy will be launched into action and, in doing so, could change her life. AWESOME. Courtesy of Paul D'Arcy Munger at https://fiabafilms.com.