Ellis Martin hates his job. He hates his roommate’s girlfriend. He hates almost everything about his life. Sunday afternoons for Ellis are spent getting wasted as a way to cushion the blow of another work-week on the horizon. His dull 9-to-5 consists of dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing toilets for a cleaning service. Ellis applies for other jobs in the hopes of finding something better – something he can live with – but even this seems futile.
That might be a good opening act for a story, but the description above is essentially the whole of independent filmmaker Shaun Rose’s hour-long film Upstate Story. There are no subplots, beyond a flashback sequence about one of Ellis’s ex-girlfriends. The movie suffers from solipsism, with no meaningful dialog coming from any character other than Ellis. Defying a cardinal rule of cinema – show, don’t tell – the entirety of Ellis’s dialog is delivered in voice over, making Upstate Story a kind of visual novel.