Getting a new job is a time to celebrate, right? Well, not always: you might be coming from a dark place, and going to a darker one. That’s the central idea behind short film The Queue, as we meet IT specialist Cole (Burt Bulos) just ahead of his first shift at a new company. Things seem to be a little off when the new boss, Rick (Jeff Doba) questions why Cole seemingly went from a lucrative career to radio silence, with a long period of unemployment before coming to the new firm. Given what this company does, though, it’s little wonder that Rick doesn’t push it too far. He’s just happy to have a new member of staff.
The job is working as a content moderator. What this reminds us is that much of what appears online gets vetted by someone, and it has to be a real someone, at least at the time of writing, so that they can make a proper assessment of what they’re seeing. Cole will be working his way through a list of suspect video content for an internet provider, deciding what gets posted and what gets deleted: people don’t tend to last too long in this role, it seems. But he gets started, and it’s not long before the footage he finds himself watching goes from sexual to violent, with immediate questions raised over what he’s seeing: is this real? A real crime? Or a clever fake? Pausing the queue to clear up the desktop on the computer he’s just inherited poses a few more questions, particularly with regards to his predecessor, and the impact of this work on him too.
By necessity, given the film’s runtime of just eleven minutes, The Queue must move quickly to show us what it wants to show us, so it takes to an extreme the potential impact of this very real tech role. Its short, snappy edits work well to quickly ratchet up the tension, and the film’s close focus on our protagonist ensures that we feel the weight of this, and how all this can impact on a person. Cleverly, we don’t actually see any grisly footage; the flagged content comes to us as the written word as we just see the specific warning labels, which is a clever device, and in being suggestive actually feels darker: you risk changing all of the dynamics when you literally show the monster, after all. We also get just enough backstory to understand something about Cole, and why he might not be the best choice for this job, not right now at least. The payoffs from what the film elects to include are high.
The film has a nicely claustrophobic, strangely unsettling vibe which makes us examine a job role we might not often consider, if we consider it all, even if we do so from a decidedly horror perspective. Raising some interesting questions about the spectre of mondo, snuff and other hazy, but undeniably disturbing facets of of filmmaking and footage which have been further raised by the internet itself, this is a well made short film. Oblique little title, too, when you really think about it…
You can check out The Queue, which is now available on YouTube, here.