The Screening Room: “Russian Roulette”

The title of “Russian Roulette,” the latest short film in our Screening Room series, is a play on words—we’re watching a comedy, not a tragedy. Lucy (Bec Hill), a lonely Australian woman living in London, talks to people on a Chat Roulette-like site that connects a rotating group of strangers. As the film begins, we’re seeing these conversations—Lucy in a room, men on a laptop. “I mean, it’s an adjustment,” she says to the first man we see, and begins to tell him about her commute. He ends the chat mid-sentence. She’s startled, then sarcastic. Next up is a shirtless man eating, disgustingly—he’s some kind of gross-eating fetishist. “You into it?” he asks. She isn’t. She’s about to give up on this cast of drips when, closing her laptop, she hears a voice protesting from within it, almost as if the machine is asking not to be put away. It’s Yergey (Stewart Lockwood), a Russian astronaut—a maintenance man on a deep-space telescope. He’s chatting with her from outer space.