Cashback

Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff) appreciates beauty. So much so that he can freeze time, strip beautiful strangers naked and ‘appreciate’ them at his leisure. But Ben’s voyeuristic passion is not an invasion of privacy, because he is an artist and therefore capable of feeling, seeing and, yes, appreciating women more vividly than the rest of us.

Expanded from his Oscar-nominated short, fashion photographer Sean Ellis’s debut feature, ‘Cashback’, is a creepy, furtive little film swimming in shallow visual trickery. The episodic script employs so much voiceover that it feels like a DVD commentary (the screenwriters’ axiom, ‘Show, don’t tell’ means nothing to Ellis), and the whole movie is laughably out of touch: this is a world where the hero works in the Whitechapel Sainsbury’s and all his colleagues are white; where perfectly sculpted women strip for change in East End pubs. A deeply discomfiting experience.