20-something Aden has no other ambition in life than to become an actor. Most of his time is spent making videos as he applies for roles he’ll never get. After a string of dreadful auditions, where bizarre and humiliating requests are made of him, he comes up with a radical move: he will take full responsibility for finding a role that primarily he, himself, wants to play. This self-assured debut, playful in form and narrative with a fairy-tale edge to it, examines both the commercial work ethic and the concept of identity, which it presents as multilayered and also questionable. At the same time, in its exploration of the given themes, the film doesn’t deny itself a socio-critical tone, nor does it resist the temptation to tease the viewer a little.

　In his first film, Shane Atkinson goes back to a cinema that isn’t afraid of mixing genres, where noir and western coexist with the most corrosive of comedies and pulp detective stories. LaRoy, some sort of earthly fairy tale, centers around the life of Ray—he’s doing quite well with his small hardware store, and is married to Stacy-Lynn, the town’s beauty queen. But his dream present crumbles when his friend Skyp, a private investigator, reveals to him that his wife is having an affair. Devastated by the news, he decides to take his own life, but when he’s about to shoot himself, he is approached by a man who mistakes him for a hitman and offers him a considerable amount of cash for a job. A wildly intelligent narrative about pathetic characters that oscillates in the thin line between irony and empathy without the audience noticing.