After a painful breakup, Ben develops insomnia. To kill time, he starts working the late night shift at the local supermarket, where his artistic imagination runs wild.
When art student Ben Willis breaks up with his girlfriend Suzy, he develops chronic insomnia after finding out how quickly she moved on. To pass the long hours of the night, he starts working the late night shift at the local supermarket. There he meets a colorful cast of characters, all of whom have their own 'art' in dealing with the boredom of an eight-hour-shift. Ben's art is that he imagines himself stopping time. This way, he can appreciate the artistic beauty of the frozen world and the people inside it - especially Sharon, the pretty and quiet checkout girl, who perhaps holds the answer to solving the problem of Ben's insomnia.—pyratio
"Would-be artist Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) realizes he has an extraordinary way of dealing with the tedium of his dead-end job stocking shelves at a store -- he has acquired the ability to halt time and explore the world while the rest of the earth's population remains frozen in place. Ben's unusual talent helps him forget about a nasty breakup with his ex-girlfriend Suzy (Michelle Ryan), but he begins to stop time so often that he may miss out on a new romance with his coworker Sharon (Emilia Fox).—krmanirethnam
Grappling with insomnia after a particularly unpleasant breakup with Suzy, his first real girlfriend, morose artist Ben Willis finds himself drifting effortlessly between past and present, reality and fantasy. Now, with nothing but time on his hands after spending two fleeting years of unfulfilled promises and emotional overdose, Ben has an epiphany: why not trade the extra hours of sleeplessness for cash, working the night shift at Sainsbury's? But love works in mysterious ways, and as Ben's vigorous imagination runs wild, freezing time at will to decipher the inner beauty of the female form, suddenly, pretty checkout clerk Sharon catches his eye. More and more, time proves to be the ultimate adversary. Is Ben spending too much time in his frozen world?—Nick Riganas
After a painful break up with his first girlfriend Suzy (Michelle Ryan), Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff), an aspiring artist, develops insomnia. To take his mind off his problem he spends his nights working at a local supermarket, where he meets colorful characters. He falls in love with his colleague Sharon Pintey (Emilia Fox).
He lets his imagination run wild. In particular, he imagines that he can stop time for others, so that he can walk around in a world that is "frozen" like in pause mode of a film. He imagines female patrons standing frozen in the supermarket, so that he can undress and draw them.
We see in flashback, with Ben's voice-over explaining how he always has been impressed by the beauty of the female body, how he, as a young boy, could see a Swedish boarder naked while she was going to and coming from the shower (we are told that, being Swedish, she did not believe this situation required modesty). Also we see little Ben's friend Sean Higgins (Shaun Evans) showing Ben his parents' adult magazines.
Sharon is Ben's date when they go to the birthday party of their boss. Ben meets Suzy who wants to continue their relationship. Ben refuses, but Sharon gets a negative impression seeing Ben with Suzy for a moment, and gets angry.
As a practical joke colleagues Barry Brickman (Michael Dixon) and Matt Stephens (Michael Lambourne) phone him, one of them pretending to be an art gallery owner who is interested in his drawings, and an appointment is made. It turns out well: the gallery owner, seeing Ben's work, is interested, and an exhibition follows. Sharon also visits it and is impressed not only by Ben's success, but also by the many paintings portraying her; ceasing to be angry with him.
