A customer service rep unravels when a mysterious rash appears on her body.


FLORENCE IN CUSTOMER CARE is used with permission from Jordan Sommerlad and Cory Stonebrook. Learn more at   / yeahyeahyeahfilms  .


Florence has a job as a customer care representative for a popular furniture website. Day after day, she's on the phone with various customers, dealing with requests and complaints. And in the office, she deals with the veiled judgments and strong personalities of her supervisors and co-workers.

As a result, Florence is under a lot of stress, despite her visualizations and other stress-reduction techniques. She stuffs much of her difficult feelings beneath the surface, but when a mysterious rash appears on her body, Florence can't keep up the act anymore.

Directed by Jordan Sommerlad and Cory Stonebrook from a script written by Stonebrook, this compelling short horror-comedy is a slyly incisive skewering of the modern workplace, taking from the perspective of a struggling worker caught up in its toxicity. When that toxicity is internalized and made visible, that worker can no longer pretend her job is sustainable and must confront the toll it's taking on her mental health.

Florence often envisions herself on a beach, radiant in golden light and basking in the soothing sound of waves. But these visions are a sharp contrast to her workplace, rendered in flat, quotidian cinematography that underscores the humdrum nature of her job. She answers phones, chit-chats awkwardly with her sometimes obnoxious co-workers and meekly fields rudeness all day. Sometimes that rudeness veers into cruelty, in moments captured in pitch-perfect writing and pacing.

These moments pile up, and as they do, Florence stuffs down her reactions of anger. But as she bottles up her feelings, a rash begins to appear on her skin. At first, it appears to be something like eczema, but as Florence's job becomes increasingly intolerable, the rash spirals into something more ominous and severe. She tries to hide the rash, but as the pressure mounts at work and a promising first date gets more intimate, she soon finds herself unable to deny its presence.

As Florence, actor Tiffany Trainor offers a delicately calibrated performance, balancing Florence's innate gentleness and sensitivity with growing anger and rage at her mistreatment. Some moments are comical, but many are more serious moments of realization, as she confronts how horrible her job is, how trapped she feels in it and how she just can't take it anymore.

Intriguing, well-paced and empathetic throughout, FLORENCE IN CUSTOMER CARE culminates in an outburst that's funny, well-earned and cathartic, both for Florence and for viewers. In the end, the film is a relatable tale for anyone who has suffered under a menial job where they've been overworked, underpaid and underappreciated -- asked to do too much with too little and to tolerate the intolerable. Florence becomes a symbol of the prototypical worker in a dystopian society, her opting out perhaps a harbinger of deeper rebellions to come.