Gloria’s Cut: The Age-Old Silver Spoon Versus A Shiny Stainless Steel Knife

Olivia Gropp’s Gloria’s Cut and its bloody pun of a title tell the story of its eponymous heroine, an aspiring actress slogging away in a wayside diner while swallowing down the bile of rejection after rejection. A comic tone deepens the bitterness and tension as a soon-to-be nepotism hire walks into the deserted establishment on a night Gloria is licking fresh wounds.

For a second in the middle somewhere, it feels like these two could be friends. The shiny pink laden Lulu (Raleigh Tabora) is snooty and rude, so that’s a moderately difficult task to accomplish, but that’s before alcohol enters the fray. But before the alcohol and the rude girl and her silver platter screenplay, there was only Gloria Schwarber (Gropp), introduced and auditioned to death; her own name had likely started to not sound like words anymore. Even then, even late at night, while her working her shift, she works on her craft. You would not view her differently—friendly, funny, skilled, bored—even if the film had not introduced her blood-spattered and slightly deranged. Those conditions have the acute ability to cultivate a readiness to choose violence close to annihilation.

The film introduces the diner accordingly, though in itself it is ordinary and unassuming: shadowed, blue green tinted framing that swirl with the potential for madness. With a shyness for medium or wide shots of the setting, especially that aren’t directly translated into Gloria’s subjectivity, the diner retains a quality of obscurity that congeals the further inside we are taken. The film mines the dark mystery of every business’ back of the house for its benefit as Gloria and Lulu’s rapidly developing frenemy situation leads to an increasingly volatile status quo. Contrast this with the effect of having a character named N.O. Buddy (Matthew Pohlkamp). He is the emblem of the satire, a middle man who makes it his business to exploit aspirants. The humour is dipped in the discontent of toiling away for an all-consuming dream while the hoops in the way get narrower, the fire higher.

As an actor, Gropp smooths down some of the occasional stiffness in the material. With Tabora, Gropp constructs a playfulness that infects even the rivalry; it makes you wish for something like Death Becomes Her here. But we are really in Ti West country.

Gloria’s Cut builds itself out of this vintage female rivalry, ornamented with humour, gore, and bitterness that knows there is no triumphant catharsis on the horizon while playing by the rules of Mr. N.O. Buddy & Friends.

Watch Gloria’s Cut Short Film Trailer