HUGH | Omeleto

A man watches paint dry. Every day, a reclusive older man named Hugh gets a delivery of paint at his doorstep. He opens the paint, brushes a streak of it on his living room wall and then sits to watch it dry, taking note of the color and time it takes. Then he makes a simple dinner and goes to bed. The next day, he does it all over again. Hugh's existence is predictable. But one day, he encounters a paint that will not dry. This aberration introduces a surprising amount of chaos into his life, upending his daily routine and destabilizing his state of mind before taking an ominous turn. Directed and written by Walker Patterson, this intriguing, oddball short drama plays with the tension between surface appearances and the secret worlds underneath, building a character portrait of a man defined by the almost monastic rigidity of his daily life before taking it into a satisfyingly unpredictable direction. Told without much dialogue, the visual storytelling at first carefully cultivates a sense of the whimsical and eccentric, with pristine cinematography capturing the fundamentally colorful world of Hugh, a painter whose living room wall is covered in swaths of paint that he observes drying for his work. But as the film painstakingly observes Hugh's daily rituals and duties, the surface quirkiness becomes symptomatic of a personal stasis and refusal to adapt, and the contours of Hugh's and the film's aesthetic become less an example of personal expression and more a prison of his own making. Beyond the striking visuals, the storytelling's careful, deliberate pacing is one of its hallmarks, allowing us a deep look into the details that make up Hugh's life. We observe Hugh's diligent attention to his work, how he carefully color-coordinates his canned dinner with the paint, even the way he tucks himself into bed. Actor Richard Rivera's performance as Hugh is similarly self-contained, as he's deeply absorbed by his job and buffeted by his routine. But when he gets a can of paint that refuses to dry, the careful rituals of his life fall apart. He goes to great efforts to get the paint to dry, some of which are comical. But some efforts are also dangerous, wrecking Hugh's careful, tidily private world. We don't know if the defective paint is a careful provocation at all from his mysterious employer, since as viewers we are entirely confined to Hugh's milieu. And when the paint itself reveals its true nature, Hugh is faced with a choice to break out of his hermetic realm and his way of doing things -- or face a fate as strange and odd as his life. The ending section of HUGH is at first a tightening of the noose, bringing a sinister momentum and suspense and accomplishing a remarkable transformation of a quirky, observant character piece into something approaching psychological horror. But it ends with a note of release and relief, one that fills in some blanks and weaves a sense of lightness and freedom into the proceedings -- both for Hugh and for viewers who may find themselves unexpectedly resonating with how the safety of routines can slowly twist into perilous traps. HUGH. Courtesy of Walker Patterson at https://instagram.com/hughshortfilm.