The Oak Room

Stevie (RJ Mitte) returns to his rural home town in the midst of a snowstorm and goes to the local dive bar. The barman Paul (Peter Outerbridge) is furious with him: Stevie owes him big time and Paul is incredulous when he offers to pay him back with a story "worth a thousand words".

No good will come of this.

This rambling neo-noir is built from layered stories and might have been interesting if almost every single piece of dialogue wasn't a macho pissing competition.

It also does that anti-exposition thing where the characters very pointedly don't clearly refer to things they're talking about to the extent it's ridiculous and unnatural. It stops being an effective technique to build mystery almost straight away and quickly becomes irritating.

Boring 4/10 with a denouement I just shrugged at but I'd sort of stopped paying attention so may have missed something that gave it heft.