It will be interesting to see what this promising filmmaker’s new horror/thriller, The Brøken, is like. For its meagre budget however, this Cashback is fairly entertaining and soulful, with good performances from all involved. The amoral ambiguity and high porn content of the original Cashback (still one of the most downloaded shorts on the internet) is diminished by the construction of a fairly conservative framework whose central message seems to be that love is always right in front of you.
With Ellis taking the unusual route of building a backstory around his short, this has the effect of creating a couple of continuity anomalies and a whole load of tedious padding.
Maybe Sharon (Emilia Fox) the checkout girl can help him sort his head out.įor his debut feature, writer/director Sean Ellis has chosen to broaden out his award-winning 2004 short of the same name, allowing it to exist in its complete form as the centrepiece of this lightweight fusion of Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic and Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Morvern Callar. While his playful workmates muck about, he’s hallucinating naked women in the aisles. Ever since he split up with his girlfriend Suzy (Michelle Ryan) he’s been wandering around in a daze. ĭVD Extras: Audio Commentary by the director with Sean Biggerstaff Deleted Scenes Making-of featurette Original theatrical trailer.In the words of Faithless’ Maxi Jazz, art student and late night supermarket shift worker Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) ‘can’t get no sleep’. The idiosyncratic, when done with a lightly intelligent touch and an ironic sense of humour is exactly the quality that carries these kinds of films and Cashback has enough of it to make it a fair addition to the catalogue. Some may find the disrobing of women in the supermarket a tad offensive, or at least not as interesting as Ellis found it, still, one could argue, that it's guilelessly done and it is at least true to the perspective of the hero/director. The film, as much as it is embellished by Ben’s metaphysical ability to freeze time is essentially about male sexuality and sexual desire. In an attempt to get beyond his misery he gets a job on the nightshift at Sainsbury’s where he meets a couple of likely lads (Michael Dixon and Michael Lambourne), the typically deluded store-manager (Stuart Goodwin) and sweet checkout girl, Sharon (Emilia Fox). So much so that he can freeze time, strip beautiful strangers naked and appreciate them. Cashback is an example of how unique an independent film can be. Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff) appreciates beauty. While this is a film that shows signs of considerable imagination, for which its kernel as a short film won a. The goofy stock boys the stodgy boss and others fill in the cast like a Kevin Smith movie. The film is a reworking of Ellis’s Oscar-nominated 20 minute short of the same title (most of which is included here as the nude supermarket scenes) and tells the story of Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff) who has just broken up with his girlfriend, Suzy (Michelle Ryan). Cashback, a movie review by Jules Brenner.
In this British variant it's all about art school romance, soccer and working at Sainsbury's.
Sean Ellis’s feature debut is a likeable, if rather familiar, account of post-adolescent angst that belongs to the “whimsical” school of independent film-making with its roster of diffident anti-heroes and off-beat characters.
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