This Place Only Destroys: A Battle of Attrition, AKA Contemporary Labour Practices

Sean Cruser’s 26-minute workplace drama is really a psychological horror (if not just a documentary) about how well toxic workplaces wear you down and reshape you. The protagonist, an Indian-origin woman in a white-male team, straddles the line between competence and powerlessness as it pleases her boss to toggle her. And the film asks, how long can you beat the dead horse before you reanimate it into a beast of resentment?

Shalini Bathina plays Brit, a corporate woman tottering on her last legs on thin ice at work. She barely sleeps, fuelled by the need to perfect her brainchild and the hope of earning just a sliver of the same security that keeps her teammates comfortably buying $15,000 aquariums. Meanwhile, her boss (Matthew Patrick Davis) breezes off to enjoy three months in Europe. What she does earn are iterations of the same crucial piece of advice: wear makeup. It must be difficult to oversee her human integrity when the bare fact of her existence is not smoothed over with primer and foundation. Even a little colour on her lips would considerably brighten up the days of her pale white coworkers.

But as they barely pay her for her (over)work, you struggle to visualise them paying her for cosmetic products. Perhaps it is the same lack of creativity that Brit gets charged with. For that offence, the office hires a consultant (Tyler Beveridge) to take over Brit’s project—and to make up for that, she can take over the work of two people when they decide to fire one of her teammates (Mark David Christenson).

The psychological cost incises itself into Brit’s nights. Before she knows it, workplace insecurity mutates within Brit into a sharp appetite for blood, whether of friend, foe, or self. The home she shares with her partner (Amir Kamali) is no longer secure from the intrusions of a career forever under threat. The film does not try too hard to whip up a ghost or a monster for the house, only the suggestion is enough to poison the air. But it does not restrain itself in other avenues. Devices begin to haunt Brit’s consciousness until reality loses its firm edges even for the audience. Yet the genius of the film is that, when it matters, the horror is kept undeniably within absolute reality (keep an eye out for a certain interview scene featuring Murphy Patrick Martin).

Bathina does wonders with her face, sustaining a delicate range of shifts to denote momentary and longer term changes in the character. To a large extent, it is due to her that Brit is always a full person instead of a container of authorial ideas and genre expectations. Which is not to disparage either the direction or the writing, both of which exhibit a sure hand and light touch.

The final image pays off on the promise of that powerful title and This Place Only Destroys leaves you with the impression that you can try to jump ship all you like but not only are you tethered to the vessel but it also won’t get any of us very far when the water too is on fire.

Watch This Place Only Destroys Short Film Trailer