In the lost hour between daylight savings and standard time, two codependent thieves kidnap a man in his motel room. One thief believes their captor is a man who has wronged them in the past, but the other isn’t sure.

Paul and Silas in a Motel Room explores the tensions of devotion to another person and one’s own moral principles. Subverting the home invasion genre, the setting of a motel room creates a transient space that no one can definitively claim, and right and wrong are dictated by the most powerful in the room.
The presence of a hostage destabilizes the codependent dynamic, collapsing any neutral ground and forcing each character toward action or complicity. As the unity of the pair begins to fracture, the film moves away from the conventions of a home invasion crime film and closer to a domestic melodrama.
Inspired by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorman’s Death and the Maiden and shot on consumer-grade equipment, the film embraces a raw, degraded texture and spurts of handheld camerawork to evoke the intimate and immediate qualities of a family fight captured on home video.
The film is a confrontation of my own habits of mutual reliance and how prolonging unhappy and difficult relationships can be preferred to radical change and ultimate loss.


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