"SWERVE" Short Film Thriller starring Juno Temple & Shiloh Fernandez

SWERVE starring Shiloh Fernandez & Juno Temple is set in a deserted “middle of nowhere” Midwestern town, SWERVE takes place at the last stop on the edge of the world. While abstractly exploring complicated issues of fate, reality and chance, SWERVE presents a narrative tale examining the intricacies of the human condition. A young couple, Daniel and Missy are desperately seeking a way out. Out of their town. Out of their routine. Out of the monotony that shrouds their very existence. They yearn to break free from the automatic existence from which they have grown accustomed. To feel alive. Desperation coupled with the impulsivity of youth overpowers Daniel and Missy’s ability to think rationally. This toxic combination leads the young couple to a careless robbery attempt at their local diner. As fate would have it, the plan goes sour, surreally spiraling their worlds into a state of limbo. A fatal car crash finds Daniel at the dividing line between reality and oblivion, a place where events play out over and over again. A lifeless Missy lay beside him while a bloody pick-up truck driver, Ray Earl, is gasping for life. Daniel makes the decision to get help, running back to the very place he and Missy robbed moments before. When he reaches the diner, something is different. Missy is sitting at a booth amongst a crowded room of customers. She is alive and with that, Daniel has been given the chance to rewrite his own story. For the first time, Daniel experiences the persuasive power of love, a place where clarity becomes possible. This realization changes the way he thinks everything can and should be. He realizes there is another way out. Out of their town. Out of their routine. Out of the monotony that shrouds their very existence. Love. Love is the way out. While Daniel shares these revelations with Missy, he begins looking around the diner and surveying his surroundings when a feeling of discomfort arises within him. Unable to precisely place the feelings, he just knows something seems off. Strange. As they are about to leave the diner, their old ways, their personal hell and begin a new chapter of their lives, a familiar face enters the diner. Ray Earl, the pick-up driver and the man we come to know as the polar opposite of Daniel’s character barges through the doors of the diner with a shotgun insisting the contents of the cash register immediately be handed over to him. Confronted with a conscienceless and maniacal Ray Earl, Daniel finds himself standing amid a slew of scared patrons clutching to the thin layer of floorboard separating them from the earth below. With a single sentence, a whirlwind chain of events and a dramatic twist of fate, all the decisions Daniel has made up to this point catapult him out of the paradoxical world within which he has existed into a moment of decisiveness. Clarity. A single bullet escapes Ray Earl’s shotgun ironically putting an end to Daniel’s life moments after the fog from his world had finally lifted. Contentedness washes over him. Although he does not fully understand why, Daniel welcomes his death knowing it was not his poor decisions that led him there but the right ones. He succumbs to the ultimate sacrifice he has made with ease and peace of mind. Grappling with the soulful complexities of life throughout the film, in the end SWERVE boils down to three truths: Live. Die. Love.

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