A Killer Service

Gig worker Elliott (Efrangeliz Medina) is scrambling to pay off a debt left to her by her con man father. Director / co-writer Gio Randazzo’s 25-minute short film A Killer Service follows Elliott as she hustles to pull together the payments for the debt she inherited. She is under pressure and out of control of her life and deeply resents the wealthy people she does work for. Elliot is comfortable with scamming people, and she is a charming thief.

We meet her as a ride-share driver when she memorizes a credit card number read out loud by a customer on his ride and uses it to make online purchases. At her next gig, she’s been hired to hang wall art for a lady, whom she fantasizes about killing when the woman scolds her for wearing her shoes inside the house. She spends her time accumulating money for the payments by whatever means necessary.

“…spends her time accumulating money for the payments by whatever means necessary.”

When a customer gets handsy with her while painting trim in his house, she loses her calm demeanor, and things take a nasty turn. The eventual outcome of this misfortune is that Elliot and her friend Addison (Sophie Belle Goldstein) decide to take action against men who have wronged them and kept them down. They begin to plan dark deeds and intend to recruit more women into their enterprise.

A Killer Service is a brief, entertaining romp that takes reductive shortcuts to get to every beat. Despite the brevity of the film, Randazzo manages to assert that rich people suck, gig jobs are demeaning, men are feral beasts, and parents are useless drags on life from whom one will only inherit grief. This is likely true for some people, and there’s certainly an audience for the film. Medina plays a beautiful and charming thief, and the time spent with her is a gift. The film is fun but uneven.

The shaky narrative is supported by winning performances from Medina and Goldstein. There’s a similar vibe in Emma Seligman’s Bottoms, another film taking on female empowerment as a theme, with equally sketchy females looking to be empowered. At the end of the film, after a clever post-credit sequence, comes a card indicating “More to come…” It will be interesting to see what adventures await Elliott and Addison and the murderous posse they assemble.