The film opens in the confines of a dark, unfinished basement. The space is dirty and cluttered with old boxes, tools and other assorted objects. From one end of the room, rusty music warbles from an old Victrola and the faint ticking of a clock permeates the room. The squeezebox-like music begins to slow down and loose pitch as the record player's spring finishes unraveling itself, forcing the character in the basement to leave his worktable and once again crank up the machine.
On the worktable sit many pieces of wood, tools and a broken pendulum. Upon returning to the table, the character resumes his attempts to fix the broken device. Unfortunately, his efforts are in vain as they only serve to frustrate him more and more every time the pendulum refuses to swing as it should.
Eventually, the movement from the table to the record player becomes too tedious and annoying, leaving the character in the silence of the basement, save the constant ticking of the clock. His task, not getting any better, soon becomes worse as every tick of the clock begins to sound louder than the last, making concentration more and more difficult. The eventual solution to this is the dismantling of the clock leaving the character in total silence.
Still unable to fix the pendulum, the character is suddenly startled by the sound of ringing. He looks up towards the ceiling and puts down his tools. On the third ring, the character leaves the worktable and heads up the stairs towards the basement door. He turns the doorknob and to his dismay, finds himself unable to open the door. In fact, no matter how hard he tries, the door will not budge. The ringing continues, each ring frustrating him more than the last. He runs back down and looks for a key that might unlock the door. Eventually, he finds one but unfortunately, it does not unlock the door and instead, gets stuck in the keyhole.
With stress and frustration mounting, the character attempts to escape his situation through locked windows in the basement but it soon becomes clear that escape is not possible. Sound begins to become distorted as we see the apparent hopelessness of his situation. The character must find a way to overcome his frustrated state or succumb to his own despair. |
