Reflective Encounters

“Store Policy’s rendering of the world of work in the 21st century is an austere, minimalist supermarket of white walls, white machines, seemingly white everything, save for the faces of the multi-ethnic women of colour stationed at the tills, and for the splashes of red which will make an arrival towards the film’s climax. Contrasted with the casual bonhomie of the staff room, the shop floor is a world of sterility, its workers induced into frantic, robotic trances as they attempt to meet the arbitrary scanning quota, rendered even more arbitrary by the apparent absence of both products and customers.

Fresh-faced Léa, sunnily optimistic about saving money to travel abroad, might have little in the way of investment in her new job, but this is in contrast to officious jobsworth boss Eric, indoctrinated in the culture of target-hitting to the point of dehumanization. But it is the figure of Léa’s weary colleague Nour, whose socio-economic precarity is in part alluded to, in part revealed in shocking fashion, that the film locates its moral core: for some, the absurdist machinations of capitalism have very real, and very damaging, consequences.”

— Jonathan Bygraves