We Buy Souls

A woman approaching her mid-life feels like the romance with her long-time boyfriend has fizzled out, and she begins considering some drastic options to fix the situation when she sees an enigmatic sign outside her coffee-shop one day.

Chiwa (Kumari) is getting pretty fed up with her relationship to Bradley (Borden). They’ve been seeing each other for three years but for the last few months there’s been nothing happening between the sheets. Bradley is the perfect guy, if what you’re looking for is grade-A chump, as he makes safe-for-work jokes and acts like an infantile prat as an attempt at humour. But, he’s cute, and kind, and clean, and safe, and he loves Chiwa – it’s just he doesn’t want to get down and dirty with it the way she does.

Chiwa tells us all about her life and her love troubles through an internal monologue, which is relayed to us in voiceover, and which comes with all the requisite bells-and-whistles of freeze-frames, flashbacks, dream sequences, and what ifs, all jumping into the frame to push her narrative side of things. This jumbled mess of a storyline is fairly representative of Chiwa as a person, and we have to try to keep up with where she is in her narrative as she goes through the ordeal of trying to sex up her life. After seeing an ominous, ‘We Buy Souls’ sign outside of her coffee-shop one day, she gets the idea that a guilt-free existence might well be the way forward in getting what she wants.

As she goes through the motions at the clinic, Chiwa considers all the different factors in her relationship with Bradley, as well as the overt moves being put on her by work-colleague, Ben (Donovan), the milk-drinker. This all turns round in Chiwa’s brain in her own inimitable style until she finally figures out what she wants, and we are party to every notion, side-thought, existential consideration, and barking madness that seems to cross her mind as she does so.

Told as a farce, We Buy Souls firmly aims its humour at the lowest common denominator and pulls out every stylistic trick in the book, several times, to help us understand the supposed comedy at play. The characters are mainly caricatures of idiots, who overtly emphasise their silliness by their mannerisms and childishness, ramping them up to the Nth degree. Sadly, none of this raises a smile, as almost all of it is too infantile and tired in its use to actually be funny in any real way. Chiwa is the only calm, sane ship, floating on a sea of madness, and even her normalcy is a screen for her plain naivety hidden underneath.

Thankfully the direction, from Rohit Relan, makes everything seem fantastically real within the context of the story, with props, locations, and other background stylings, really bringing the world of We Buy Souls straight to the viewer. The clinic itself becomes strangely reminiscent of a cheap, present-day, Total Recall (1990) centre, and the ramblings of Chiwa get turned into a nostalgic Sex and the City (1998-2004) romp through her thoughts. However, none of this can really save the narrative from its one-note, misaligned, humourless stance, and any real progress that is made in character development, or any real statement about the state of modern relationships and the dating scene, is wiped out by the try-hard, bolt-on funniness that surrounds it.

We Buy Souls is a nice idea, well-realised, and well put together, to make a cohesive thirteen minute short, and some will find its humour palatable enough to carry the story. However, there’s not enough drama to carry a reasoned interest, and as a comedy it fails in a lot of the jokes it tries to make, leaving it in a strange no-man’s land that stops it from being either.