“Richie” (auteur Shawn Christensen) has reached rock bottom as he bathes in water tinged with his own blood, razor blade in hand. Then his phone rings. Serendipity? His estranged sister needs a babysitter. Now clearly they have been apart for a while and for a reason as she makes it fairly clear that her choice of him is only marginally more preferable to stopping a stranger on the subway platform! Anyway, he agrees and takes the young girl to a bowling alley where nobody does any bowling. “Sophia” (Fatima Ptacek) plays on her games console and he smokes. They chat, and she proves remarkably sagely for a young girl. Indeed, she isn’t intimidated by his adulthood and quite quickly comes across as considerably more grown up than him. He has two options: to freeze her out until her mother returns or to engage with her. One will cost him nothing, one might give him everything. His is a life of emptiness, the cause of which we don’t discover nor that which has left him and his sibling distrustful of each other. What the young girl might be able to do is act as a loving conduit between two people who clearly haven’t their problems to seek and I suppose the thrust is somewhere between “let sleeping dogs lie” and their being “light at the end of the tunnel”. It’s clearly suggesting the choices we made - good or bad - in the past needn’t define our future, and that loneliness is a powerful toxin. Ptacek steals this, but Christensen delivers quite effectively too as it packs quite a bit into twenty minutes.
