Nora Stock has crafted a great deal of emotional turmoil into less than 10 minutes, blurring the lines between characters you could easily see being expanded into a longer piece and characters you are fine with leaving behind as they now are.
William Lund, Jenna Szoke and Scott Callenberger are all very good in roles which in the wrong hands could have seemed like a mix of Rebel Without a Cause and a WB drama. Szoke has the most thankless part, but manages to believably pitch her character's frustration at her emotionally distant boyfriend and his hanger-on, then the gravitation between them. Callenberger plays the shaggy-haired, troubled dreamboat role just right, while Lund brings major supplies of presence and off-kilter life to a role you're drawn to in spite of its toxicity.
Skillful pacing and sharp editing and lighting are very important to this short, but the key is the very easy chemistry these three actors share - when chemistry looks that easy, it seldom is. There's a real trust between everyone which keeps you watching even as the characters head toward an inevitable crash.
