NANCY, PLEASE

Paul's life is good. He is a gifted graduate student at Yale, completing a PhD in English literature, and has finally moved in with his longtime girlfriend, Jen. A bright and promising future seems assured. There's just one thing. Paul has left an item of great importance at his old apartment: a tattered, personally annotated copy of Dickens' Little Dorrit, the subject of his dissertation, and he simply must have it back. Doing so will mean recovering it from his casually sinister and inexplicably vindictive former roommate, Nancy, who blithely thwarts Paul's increasingly frantic attempts at retrieval. His annoyance turns to rage and then to obsession, until his life begins to come undone. Things will get much, much worse before they get better.

First-time director Andrew Semans realizes an immersive vision of all-consuming obsession in this fresh and smart psychodrama, effectively repurposing thriller and horror tropes in an understated drama of one man's quietly unraveling psyche. A wholly novel approach to familiar themes of quarter-life crisis, responsibility paralysis, and victim complex, Nancy, Please is an exciting debut and a reminder of the potential for utterly creative filmmaking to turn the simplest stories into the most original films.