cw: suicide, mental illness, child abuse
Yep. We’re not quite done with the heavy shit just yet. And what’s more, said heavy shit is even more intrinsic to this film than it was with Smile. The literal first image of the film is of Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) pointing guns at each other’s heads, ready to fulfil a suicide pact. The title is the countdown to them actually doing it.
So what if I were to tell you that this film is absolutely hilarious?
Like, this isn’t the kind of low-blow ‘let’s pick on the emo kid’ shit that still shows up in the mainstream every so often. Instead, what Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch have put together with this dialogue feels all too lived in, pushing social cringe so far as to reveal all that discomfort as just another defence mechanism for dealing with shit that’s even worse. It’s not designed to punch down (and in situations like this, yes, that description would apply), but to let those who have had history with this kind of ideation to see something… well, relatable. And as someone who has written a few too many times on here about my own struggles with depression, I’d say it did exactly that.
Carmichael and Abbott have been handed some of the most difficult characters of any film I’ve ever covered on here, in terms of how disastrously it could’ve gone in the wrong hands, and their performances and their chemistry with each other are just about perfect. Kevin, at a variety of levels of awareness within the film itself, is basically the epitome of an angsty white emo kid. Not only that, but in quite a few scenes, he becomes that one guy who wants to be a Black ally but hasn’t gotten past the stage of White Guilt yet. And yet, as caricature as this could’ve come across, his down-to-earth delivery and tone makes it ring true.
Opposite him, we have Val, the depressive wage slave who initially sets up the pact, and Carmichael’s work here is fucking incredible. His role is primarily to react to the wild shit Kevin says on occasion, like a twisted voice of reason, and he ends up getting some of the biggest laughs in the process. Seeing him call out Kevin for going full angst and blasting Papa Roach’s Last Resort in his car was crippling in how much of a belly laugh from me.
And between the two of them, the film at large handles the main topic of suicide in a fashion that I not only wish was the norm, but that I was able to live up to myself. It doesn’t glamourise the choice to end one’s own life (there’s no ‘die young, leave a good-looking corpse’ shit going on here), and yet it doesn’t moralise about making that choice in the first place. Instead, it acknowledges suicide as not being a good or bad choice, but that it is a choice. This is something that even those who have gone through that process struggle with, and I freely admit that myself; like I got into with Lights Out, I have a very strong gut reaction to the idea of someone choosing to end their life with depression weighing into it.
But the film even gets into those hypocrisies, like Kevin mentioning that he used to post a lot about gun control on social media, while he gets a head rush from holding a gun for the first time. It makes for an interesting admission of people as walking masses of contradictions, and it plays into the main story as well: Learning how to live life, on the day you’re planning to end it.
Not that it ever gets as treacly as that line may imply, and it’s here where I finally get to the direction, also done by Jerrod Carmichael. It carries the same sense of intimacy, like the audience is really getting to know the people on-screen, that helped make his Rothaniel show from earlier this year work so damn well. Don’t ask how I know that, living in a country that doesn’t get HBO Max.
But more than that, it’s the absolute control of tone that shows Carmichael to have some serious talent, especially for a directorial debut. The film gets into the main characters, their bro-y relationship with each other, the history of abuse that led them to the film’s opening (namely that caused by J.B. Smoove as Val’s father, and Henry Winkler as Kevin’s former doctor), a very Falling Down-style scene at a gas station, a prominent Big Mouth Billy Bass, the aforementioned slamming of tacky song choices, and a surprisingly effective use for Tiffany Haddish, and none of it feels out of place.
In terms of gallows humour, especially when it’s this direct, being able to make the audience laugh at any point already involves some real skill. That it effortlessly switches from poignant to hilarious, and all without trivialising the extremely sensitive subject matter, is damn-near miraculous, even from someone like Carmichael who regularly makes bank by being raw and vulnerable in his stand-up shows. This isn’t the kind of film where saying that I ‘enjoyed’ it feels entirely accurate, or even all that fair in regards to the film itself, but it’s a prime example of how to make jokes about mental health without turning those who struggle with it into the joke. Being able to laugh at the awful shit we go through is a necessary survival skill, not just a tactic for people who make a habit of yelling “I’m being cancelled!” through a megaphone.
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