The most unfortunate thing about The Man in the Orange Jacket is that it’s a technically sound film. The camera work is superb, the soundtrack is haunting, and the performances are quite good. So why does it fail? To put it plainly; The Man in the Orange Jacket is boring. Clocking in at just 71 minutes, I came in expecting a concise experience. What I got instead was a film that meanders through its brief runtime and ultimately fails to clear the bar set by its technical triumphs. The film teases us with brief moments of tension and even originality, but stops short of building anything resembling a satisfying sense of dread.

The film follows a disgruntled employee that is part of a massive round of layoffs. We’re lead to believe that the worker ends his last shift, and walks directly to the business owner’s home to exact a bloody revenge. It’s an interesting concept, and one that I’m sure several people can somewhat sympathize with. To that end, The Man in the Orange Jacket plays with the idea of remorse and regret. Both from the killer’s point of view and the victim’s. And while these moments are somewhat humanizing, they fail to be fully explored. Leaving us with little more than hypothetical story archs that “would” have been awesome if the filmmaker had chosen to pursue them.

To put it plainly; The Man in the Orange Jacket is boring

Writer/director Aik Karapetian shows promise in how he elegantly frames his scenes, and he goes to great lengths to draw the viewer in. The mansion where the majority of the film takes place is luxurious and beautiful .Our antagonist, played excellently by first timer Maxim Lazarev, seems adequately out of place in his new found surroundings. The majority of the score is appropriately classical, with great use of diegetic sounds to highlight the loneliness of the situation. The Man in the Orange Jackets wants so badly to make you empathize with its main character, but how can we when next to nothing of significance happens? When something does mercifully manage to occur, we’re left with more questions – questions in which I’m fairly confident that the movie had no intentions of answering.

It’s these half-hearted attempts at intrigue that eventually lead to nowhere but frustration for the viewer. Word of advice? Move along, nothing to see here.

The Man in the Orange Jacket is available onw on VOD platforms.

Man in the Orange Jacket Poster