Tom is a loser, who wants a job that will help him embrace his loserness. Your Storage in Washington Park, Chicago looks like just the ticket. His boss Hal seems a bit shifty, so to speak, but it is hard for Tom to pin down exactly how. Aside from a little mopping, Tom can just sit on the creaky office chair Hal dubbed “Grace Kelly” and watch the security monitors. Since it is the late 1990s, he does not have a smart phone to distract himself. Instead, he listens to Iris Keen, a DJ, who combines true crime talk with soul and adult contemporary.
Being relatively conscientious, Tom notices one of the cameras has slipped out of position. It happens to cover the unit rented by Mr. and Mrs. Jones, two of their regular customers. That is suspiciously convenient, because Tom knows he saw Mrs. Jones bring a younger man into the Your Storage one night, but he never saw him left.
As Tom’s voyeuristic paranoia escalates, Grace Kelly offers her commentary like a sarcastic Greek chorus. Yes, the chair talks, via silent subtitles. It might sound questionably eccentric, but the subtitles are unobtrusive and they are often archly droll. Frankly, “she” is funny enough to earn Shift a lot of extra goodwill.
