Slice: The Mortal and Divine Collide in a Little Diner in the Desert

Lauren Hoover and Siri Miller’s Slice is a thriller that keeps its eyes trained on the taut, ever tightening line between introduction and climax. Set in a diner—the place of choice for reckonings and shootouts—the 10-minute film brings together four characters and their tangle of traumas from the past, both distant and recent. 

In fact, the film opens by juxtaposing these two. A voiceover news report about a mass suicide that morning is followed by a preacher (Jason Downs) recounting the sins of his youth to the kindly waitress, Judy (Quonta Beasley) at the diner. Though she looks a little too young to be playing the quasi-maternal character who serves as our introduction to the main cast, Beasley pulls it off by emphasising the laid-back, affectionate interest her character takes in the patrons. So unruffled is she that when two young women (Schuyler Girion as Seven and Bear D’Angelo as Three) come in with blood spatter all over them, all she asks is if they are ready to order. She is similarly blind to the obvious tension in the latest newcomer, Cherry (Miller) except to note her attention straying in the direction of the preacher’s back as he happily enjoys his cherry pie and preaching daydreams. 

The film is almost languid in its pace, stretching out like a cat on a ledge, as time ticks itself down to a reckoning seemingly known only to Seven and Three. Flashbacks abound; wordless and fleeting, they productively disrupt but do not slow down the narrative. (In particular, the marvelously lit and staged flashbacks in Seven and Three’s storyline stand out, like something out of a baroque painting.) 

On the other end of the room, a storm brews within Cherry as an old photograph keeps the past with her as a discipline, or religion. Yet the blood red cherry, spilling innocently out of its shell, brings a viscerality to that past, transforms memory into affect. 

The bulk of the religious overtones are carried, somewhat fittingly, by the preacher himself. As much as he distances himself from his “ungodly” youth, a certain self-aggrandisement, a megalomania, has remained firmly attached to his being. Even though the film keeps it more of a private rehearsal than a performance for all, the audience is allowed to see him plainly, and thereby find him odious. 

The climax blends crises both deeply personal and apocalyptic. It is quiet like something too loud, too hot. To complicate things a little more, time seemingly acts in a loop, Judy at its centre. And of course, the parallel threads finally intersect, at the cost of becoming irreversibly tangled without ever having the room to acknowledge each other or their common ground. 

Watch Slice Thriller Short Film Teaser