14-Minute Short Film The Job Explains The Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Horror

Kalki Koechlin plays in The Job

English poet and playwright William Shakespeare's works are still playing significant inspiration to many in the field of creative arts. The latest is the short film The Job directed by Siddhartha Sinha and produced by Kushal Srivastava.

Idea of The Job

The Director Sinha proclaims in a recent interview that one particular character that stayed with him was that of Lady Macbeth. Inspired by that character Siddhartha wrote the short film title The Job. He says

Many films and series have been made inspired by Shakespeare's play plots. However, I have taken one character and transformed it. Lady Macbeth completely intrigued me and I took her out of the plot and wrote a different story around her characteristics.

Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn's seminal work explored a single day in the life of prisoner in the gulag, Ivan Denisovich. The span of single waking day explores and familiarizes the readers with Ivan's plight and his psychological makeup.
Director Siddhartha Sinha possibly attempts the very same as he muses on Lady Macbeth and attempts to bring forth her world view, imagined or otherwise in the span of a single day.

The Character 

The lady in this day and age is a French expat, working as a translator in a swanky office in Mumbai. Stress is consuming her as she races against deadlines while a literal race in the lanes of life has become an experience which is likely responsible for her PTSD or OCD and/or schizophrenic behavior.

The milk of human kindness

which she obviously needs is ironically exactly what she lacks.
The Job intrigues as well as excites in its non-linear cinematic journey.

It can definitely be counted as a bold attempt to show case how intensely deliberating a psychological illness can be, and  how, other people can be completely obvious to the internal turmoil that a person experiences.

The director has left the movie open ended and raises questions about Understanding and Living with Schizophrenia and how a good self-help programme can be the best answer obsessive compulsive disorder.

Silence

Silence permeates through a major part of the run time of this feature ,

Kalki in the office

interrupted only by background noise in the form of everything around the central character including perceived speech. The visuals and editing are Aronofsky-esque in its resemblance to the hip hop montage from Requiem for a Dream while the final scene is the reminder of the fate of Natalie Portman's character Nina from Black Swan.  

The young woman is visibly nervous as she sits at her desk in a typically colorless and drab corporate office. Reeling under pressing deadlines, a swelling credit card bill and traumatic memories of a road accident, she struggles to cope with her anxieties by conjuring up sounds and images, till her mind is unable to untangle  real occurrences from imagined horrors, which is in-line with Schizophrenia, PTSD, and OCD type of mental disorders.

The Rituals

As the lady washes her hands we are awash with the specter of

Kalki, the Fremch Expat's OCD rituals

impending doom and continuing symbolic degeneration of the mind - the effect is indeed haunting. The ghastly environment plays out as a wasteland emblematic of the deteriorating mental health of the character and her life.

Final Thought 

The character pattern is analogous to the disillusions faced by a psychiatric patient. Sinha does not romanticize but rather shows the exact pains of surviving a single day plagued by mental illness. The monotony of a simple day contrasts with the complexities of mental health issues while being placed in the foreground of an adaptation of one literature's most famous character. Sinha's job looks Shakespearean but one he accomplishes with fineness.
        
 Watch the Short Film The Job here