Sam Baron (2018)
I stumbled across this fourteen-minute British comedy on IMDb and watched it on YouTube. I rarely write about shorts but writer-director Sam Baron’s The Orgy is worth making an exception for.
John (Amit Shah), bearing wine and chocolates, arrives at a suburban house. He might have come for a meal with friends except that he’s noticeably twitchy. In fact, he’s come for an orgy with people he’s met only through online chat. He thought the event began at 7pm; Karen (Kerry Godliman), the lady of the house, informs him the start time has been put back – didn’t John get the email? Karen then starts arguing with her husband Geoff (Nicholas Burns), who’s leaving to go to work. John, still standing outside their front door and startled by the domestic, drops and smashes his bottle of wine. Karen sends him to the back garden to wait with Gary (Dustin Demri-Burns), who didn’t get the email either. Gary is as laidback as John, holding on to his box of chocolates, is nervous. After a bit of halting conversation, John remembers he has ‘something to do’ and escapes. He sits on a park bench, eating chocolates. He sees a couple kissing nearby and returns to Karen’s place. It’s getting dark by now.
We learn from his first exchange with John that Gary has done some questionable online research on his fellow orgiasts. So he knows John’s ‘into fencing’, though he doesn’t know what John’s on about when he tries to explain this is fencing with swords and masks. Gary assumed garden fencing, not least because of John’s chat-room user name. John ruefully admits that I_Got_Wood78 (he’s very clear about the underscores when Karen checks she has his contact details right) is ‘just a silly sexual reference joke because of the …’ Gary has also accessed John’s wedding page and asks if his wife’s coming to the orgy. John says the wedding never happened, Gary that he’s sorry because the bride-to-be was ‘fit’. These few details supply all the backstory we need to find the rest of The Orgy making complete sense. John isn’t there for debauchery: he’s just looking for the right girl.
Has he found her in Meg (Alexandra Roach), username the.vicar’s.daughter, who interrupts John’s panicked exile in Karen’s sauna room? Their conversation there is beautifully played and written, with quite a focus on literacy. Meg enjoys I_Got_Wood’s posts; John says she wouldn’t believe how long it takes him to write them; Meg can imagine – ‘the grammar and syntax are impeccable’. John liked a post from the.vicar’s.daughter proposing an orgy to raise funds for refugees; someone else made a tasteless suggestion in response to this and Meg got him banned from the chat-room. John’s pleased to hear it: the man ‘was an idiot’. Meg corrects him – ‘He was a prick!’ That causes a brief awkward silence that John fills by asking if Meg’s dad’s really a vicar. The answer is no and John laughs sheepishly. ‘It’s my mum that’s the vicar’, Meg adds. They discuss the past participle of ‘to smite’ but John’s dumbstruck again when Meg asks if he wants a kiss. ‘Maybe later’, she says comfortingly and exits the sauna.
John is about to exit the whole thing for a second time after seeing Gary in a clinch with Meg. He has his coat on when she reappears with her phone, checking with her babysitter that all’s well with her six-year-old son. Meg seems sorry John’s leaving and asks if he’d now like to go upstairs with her. He suddenly throws caution to the winds, kissing and touching her. When they do head upstairs to continue you feel the glow of relief of a looming happy ending. Only for a moment, though, as Gary joins in, with Meg happy for him to do so. It is an orgy, after all. The film’s closing credits begin. Sam Baron interrupts them to show Karen and Geoff, the morning after, removing protective plastic covers from their sofa and its cushions; and John arriving somewhere for a fencing class, looking characteristically unsure. The fencing instructor (Raphael von Blumenthal) pleasantly assures him he’s in the right place. Putting his bag down, John asks a girl fencer (Ella Jones) if it’s in her way. She replies not at all, with a smile, and he smiles back. When the girl looks away to concentrate on her fencing stuff John glances at her again, hopefully.
Sam Baron’s direction of proceedings is admirably matter-of-fact and the whole cast plays impeccably straight. In a charming, perfectly judged performance, Amit Shah – tall, skinny, his large eyes full of fear – makes John very funny and truly touching. Vivid Alexandra Roach partners him splendidly. Kerry Godliman’s Karen wants to be a good hostess but her short fuse repeatedly gets in the way. Dustin Demri-Burns keeps you smiling, against your better judgment, at Gary’s whatever candour. Sam Baron and Amit Shah evidently enjoyed working together: they’ve collaborated on two more shorts since – Big Ears (2021) and Tall Dark and Handsome (2023). I’m looking forward to seeing them.
11 April 2024
