WARNING:

This review contains spoilers for the Cinemalaya 2020 Main Competition Shorts Entry “Fatigued”. Read at your own risk.

REVIEWER’S RATING: 6/10

SYNOPSIS: One night, you overslept because of too much work. Now, you must wake up before your nightmare becomes a reality.

Fatigued is an “interactive film” by Director James Mayo, where you play as yourself, a tired and overworked employee, who overslept one night. How do you wake up? How do you know what is real?

The film has a really eerie feel to it from the start. It claims to be an interactive film where audience participation is important. The opening also includes a reminder to use a good speaker or headphones and to watch the film in a dark room for a better viewing experience.

The film then continues to show a montage of the everyday lives of our workforce — busy streets, long commutes, traffic, the waiting. The clips are edited differently as if you are viewing everything with really tired eyes.

Everything is from the viewer’s point of view. Sound effects are kept to a minimum; no music bed, just the normal sound of the film’s environment. This, together with the “lost tape recording” style of filming halfway through the film will really give the viewer those goosebumps.

Story-telling was quite confusing to me. I initially thought that the things that are happening to the main character are because of him experiencing sleep paralysis and that he is trying to wake up from it — and although I understand that the character was trying to wake himself up from a dream, it did not occur to me that he just overslept because of fatigue.

Behind all that, it did not fail to deliver the message of how every rank and file employee succumbs to fatigue because of just how the workforce is.

“You’ve awakened. But you're dead,” is a powerful statement to close the film. Some people are alive, not living. Some people have already parts of them that died because of the unfair treatment of the world.

Watch Fatigued online under Main Competition Shorts A now on Video on Demand from August 7 to 16, 2020. Visit the Cinemalaya Official Facebook Page for more information, or click here: https://bit.ly/31xVui6