The nights are long. The days are dark. Times are weird, and traumatic, and the news has become a post-apocalyptic sci-fi parody of itself. Which seems like perfect timing to share our latest short film…

This is the second in a trilogy of collaborations between myself, director Sophie Broadgate and sound artist Synda Sova (if you missed the first one, about serial killers, adolescent sexuality and being obsessed with a certain slasher movie franchise getting rebooted this week, you’ll find that one here).

​Lack of Daylight is is a tribute to anyone who’s ever done a job with ‘anti-social hours’; a beautiful, dizzy dive into a world of opulence, exhaustion, behind-the-scenes decay and minimum wage hallucinations. You know the ones. Or maybe you don’t. But they’re some of my strangest memories: the memories that are somehow simultaneously hyper-vivid and blurred around the edges, making you unsure if they even happened the way you recall, or if you dreamed the entire thing.

For significant stretches of my teenage years, I worked in retail, and those overnight shifts doing inventory or stock-fill in near-empty shopping centres had so many bizarre elements: the isolation and the sense of being somewhere you shouldn’t, the weird solidarity and intimacy forged between you and your colleagues in those early morning hours you’ve been awake too long and you’re so zoned out that everything’s become hysterical. I did bar jobs too, and front-of-house in hotels, where the transience and anonymity and downright odd antics of some of the guests and staff all heightened that strange sense of liminality and disconnect from the normal daytime world.

That was my starting point when I wrote this piece, one that I performed across the UK pre-pandemic and in doing so heard so many stories from audience members about their experiences doing ‘lack of daylight’ roles. Capitalism is infinitely exhausting, and does so much damage to our physical and mental health. Overnight working is just one aspect of that. So shooting this film in a crumbling mansion with rats skittering at the corners of our peripheral vision (and trying to steal our cakes) felt as close as we could get to that tired-but-wired, bored-but-on-edge sensation of the minutes and hours slipping by on a seemingly endless overnight shift. And I’d love it so much if you gave it a few minutes of your time today.

Originally published in my newsletter in January 2022