TREADMILL | Omeleto

A man wants a promotion. Atlas is a sales associate at a trendy sportswear store who has been working in the same position for quite a long time. He's long due for a raise and promotion, but his manager and boss Harvey is demanding, manipulative and mean. One day, when Atlas is trying to make a sale, Harvey humiliates Atlas in front of his customer. Sick and tired of the toxic work environment, Atlas hatches a plot to get Harvey fired, in hopes that he will supplant Harvey and create a better workplace for himself. Directed and written by Pierluigi Campa, this clever, incisive workplace dramedy is both a darkly funny send-up of the lust for power in a small business and a smart examination of how such power dynamics are created in the first place. Well-written and directed with an eye and ear for heightened, slightly stylized humor and character, it captures Atlas's journey as a put-upon, oppressed Everyman who decides he's had enough of insults and humiliation at his job and foments a personal revolt against his bully of a manager. The deft, self-contained storytelling is confined mostly to the store where Atlas works, filled with high-end footwear and trendy clothing. Atlas is good at his job and connects well with his clients, but he's constantly goaded by Harvey, who inserts himself into many of Atlas's sales. Harvey is publicly cruel to Atlas's co-workers as well; we're clear as viewers that Harvey runs his store like a personal fiefdom, using intimidation and instability to control his underlings. As Atlas, actor Oli Higginson conveys both the cowed demeanor of a worker trying to do his job under a cruel supervisor and a growing, seething resentment at it all. He smarts under Harvey's growing manipulations, played by actor Luke Harrison, who hides his menace underneath an aggressive humor. But when Harvey's treatment turns outright torturous, Atlas retaliates. This turn of events is framed like a just comeuppance of a horribly awful boss, and it's hard not to root for Atlas to succeed, considering all we've seen. But at the end, TREADMILL takes another shift, this time via character, and we observe how just how the individual jostles for power and the lengths we go to achieve it can change someone. The title of the film becomes an ironic, thought-provoking commentary on the nature of power itself, about how the wrong use of it can create a negative experience and atmosphere and how it impacts us morally, emotionally and mentally. It leaves us much to think about at its end, and how, in even these smaller, self-contained environments, the resonances can still feel quite heavy. TREADMILL. Courtesy of Pierluigi Campa at https://instagram.com/treadmill_shortfilm.