Job Specifics:

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SYNOPSIS

A slaughterhouse worker called Terry, had an accident, is paralysed and wheelchair bound. He sits alone in his living room and three women form his past visit him; his co-worker, his ex-fiancé and his mother. They all come to abuse and destroy him. As their accusation and anger rises their flesh rots in front of his eyes and the room begins to swallow him, the wheelchair begins to wrap meat hooks around his dead legs and everything warps. Finally, a caretaker comes to feed him lunch. Everything is back to normal, except we know that what we saw is a constant reality for Terry.

TERRY

Terry has paralysis in his legs. He is immobile and depends on his caretaker for everything. Because of his immobility and constant stillness, his memories and his past have started to haunt him. As a kid Terry was drawn to killing animals and insects. He liked to go for shopping meat with his mom. This strange attraction towards death and dead beings made him work at a slaughterhouse. Terry has a platonic relation with his mom. She, thinking herself as an elite class personality, has a lot of expectations from Terry. She wants him to be a known and accomplished personality. His mom\'s constant struggle to make him a respectable man with an ambition eventually failed. May be Terry\'s father was in the army and hence his mom was fed up of killings and death and such similar elements in her life. Terry found killing animals and playing with bodies very fascinating. He should have enjoyed doing it for a certain period of time before he heard about his father’s death on the battlefield. His father must have probably died by overstepping a mine because of which he must have torn into pieces. The national army must have sent his coffin to his house and Terry must have undergone a shock after that because he must have seen his father in bits and pieces. Terry should have lost the interest in killing animals at the slaughterhouse and must be finding it hard to do it but on the other hand his coworker must be quite fine with killing and cutting of animals. Terry must have started questioning himself and his life as it is surrounded by death all the time. He must be questioning his morals and thinking how he was ignorant about it before. He must have lost focus on his work and his co-worker must be finishing more than half of his incomplete slaughters. During one busy day Terry must have been lost in his own thoughts while slaughtering and he may have not killed the animal properly. So this animal must have hit him and caused him to fall back into a huge meat-grinder which caused paralysis. Dawn was the best thing that happened to Terry. She was beautiful and caring. She was in love with Terry and ignored the fact that he was working in the slaughterhouse. She took care of his house and gave unconditional love. She was less aware of Terry\'s unstable psyche. She never knew that he was in a constant conflict in his mind. Maybe she never knew Terry\'s past so well. Terry must have changed completely and should have gone completely numb and silent.

DAWN

Dawn is Terry’s ex-lover/fiancé. They met at university when they were young (in their early 20’s). Dawn finished university; Terry quit early to work at the slaughterhouse to get more money. She had always been bright, kind and lively. Throughout their relationship they spent many years planning their future together. She more so than him. She was in love with Terry, idolising what he was (imagining him to be more than he was). After a ‘magical\' day at away (at the seaside, walking along the pier), they decided to marry each other (Terry was too shy to ask her properly). They were wrapped up in making a new life together, but as Dawn made more and more changes and plans to start family and put her energy into the relationship, she shortly noticed Terry’s strange obsession with his work and perpetually increased disassociation with reality. She was never too pleased about his position at the slaughterhouse and found any details too gory to even think about so deep inside she pretended that he worked some place else and tried to make continuous hints at him going to work with Tim (an old school friend of Terry’s whom he lost touch with as his job devoured more and more of his mind) in a business firm.

After few failed attempts to bring ‘her’ Terry back she found solace in Tim, first seeking help from him, then falling into a sexual relationship and eventually (years after leaving Terry) marrying him and having kids.

Dawn left Terry when she was 29/30. When Dawn comes to Terry in his vision (in our film) she is 29, the way he remembers her before she left him.

Dawn is slim, sensuous, softly spoken but confident because of her intelligence. She is loyal to Tim, but remembers Terry with kindness. A sadness at how things went so wrong but she hasn’t kept in touch with him after leaving him due to his disintegration from society and stable-mindedness.

Dawn’s (through Terry’s mind) biggest advantage (fear) over Terry is her beauty and womanly strength. She is his greatest loss. Her character sends shivers down his back and if he wasn’t so immobile/paralysed physically and numb in the mind he would fall to the ground screaming and crying for her to come back. Yet, he does none of this. Those feelings are inside him.

MARTHA

Terry’s mother is a strong-minded person. She is very concerned with appearances and money. Martha was never rich but always did her best to act like it. She tries to dress herself so it will make her appear that way by wearing cheap clothes that look expensive.

Her bitterness comes exactly from that frustration of not being what she believes she has to be. So, as a young woman, she tries to find a husband that can help her climb the social ladder. She sees potential in Terry’s father but although he is a smart man, he never had the ambition to go very far and ended up in a mediocre job. When she sees that happening she persistently tries to push him into being more. One day he gets frustrated enough and leaves Martha and young Terry. During that time, Martha starts to smoke which develops into a compulsive addiction in the future.

Terry has always had a difficult relationship with his mother. Since he was a child she has put all her hopes in him. She saw him as her last chance in being part of the high society, therefore expected so much of him. On the other hand, she constantly compared him to his father and thought in the back of her mind that he would never make it.

In Terry’s hallucination, Martha is in her fifties and in the height of her anger towards life. She has short hair and is slightly overweight. The wrinkles on her face are desperately hidden with make up as she is terrified to be getting older and not having changed anything in her life. All that dissatisfaction is let out on Terry. She is most definitely evil in her comments about him and she does not spare any words when saying that her failure in getting where she wanted is as much his fault as the accident he had. She also tries to make it his fault that the father left them, as she could never accept that she was the one to drive him away; and just as the father, Dawn left him too.

HAYLEY

Haley was Terry\'s worker at the slaughterhouse; she is in her late 20s. A sadistic bully, Haley takes pride and joy in her work. Built for the job, she is tough and butch with a brutal appearance to match her personality. Terry himself has a strange attraction to the slaughterhouse, which he hides well, and it is something that he is ashamed of (unlike Haley who loves it) and she uses this as a way to taunt him. She is also the only character who has actually been with Terry in the factory so she knows what the world looks like. Only she hasn\'t let it affect her and she still manages to live a relatively active life outside of work, which Terry never managed to do. There could have been a possible sexual presence between the two but Haley is not interested in men so she is yet another source of rejection for him. She is a very strong woman, physically and emotionally, but slightly primitive in her attitudes towards death and the work. She is quick paced and disturbingly happy, she has no sympathy, for her there are no excuses. Work is work and Terry has to get up and get on with it.

SUSAN

Susan is the nurse/caretaker for Terry. She is in her early thirties, professional, polite but cold. She has worked in the field for many years and has learnt not to get too emotionally attached to her patients for her own sanity’s sake. She is good at the work she does, doesn’t show over the top sympathy for Terry, as she believes that people with disabilities are not victims but should be treated like everyone else. She is a neutral character that brings the audience back to reality in one cut.

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