On the Count of Three
2022 · Jerrod Carmichael
Val has reached a place where he feels the only way out is to end things. But he considers himself a bit of a failure—his effectiveness lacking—so he figures he could use some help. As luck would have it, Val’s best friend, Kevin, is recovering from a failed suicide attempt, so he seems like the perfect partner for executing this double suicide plan. But before they go, they have some unfinished business to attend to.
dir. Jerrod Carmichael · 2022
A directorial debut that opens with two best friends pointing pistols at each other outside a strip club — a suicide pact sealed like a handshake — and then has the nerve to be funny about it. Jerrod Carmichael, already among the most formally daring stand-up comedians of his generation, gives himself and Christopher Abbott one last day above ground to settle old business, and the film becomes a jittery, mordant errand-run through mulch yards, dirt-bike tracks, and the doorsteps of men who deserve a visit. Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch's script won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance in 2021, and its achievement is tonal: the jokes never defuse the despair, and the despair never swallows the jokes — a balance almost nothing on this subject has managed. Abbott plays it as a live wire; Carmichael counters with an eerie deadpan stillness he would soon turn on himself in Rothaniel, the confessional special he released the following year.
Lines of influence
- Harold and Maude (1971) — Establishes the template of playing suicide as comic material — its cold open of staged, matter-of-fact suicide attempts is the tonal permission slip for Carmichael's opening gun-in-the-mouth gag.
- The Fire Within (Le Feu Follet) (1963) — The originating 'last day before a planned suicide' structure, in which the doomed man makes a round of visits to people from his past — the errand-run-as-goodbye that the film re-tools into a revenge/reconciliation checklist.
- Mikey and Nicky (1976) — A night-long two-hander pairing a volatile live-wire (Cassavetes) with an anxious foil, crossing the city as loyalty curdles — the exact volatile/deadpan acting contrast and friendship-under-pressure architecture.
- Midnight Cowboy (1969) — Model for the doomed male-friendship duo whose abrasive banter masks tenderness, structured toward a mortality-shadowed downbeat ending rather than reconciliation.
- The Fisher King (1991) — Yokes mental illness and suicidal despair to a redemptive male-friendship comedy, calibrating whiplash swings between clowning and genuine psychic wound — the tonal-balance problem the film inherits.
- Withnail and I (1987) — Two-hander tragicomedy of one manic and one dry-witted man on a shared self-destructive journey, mining despair for verbal comedy without softening the underlying ruin.
- After Hours (1985) — Codifies the single-day errand-run that escalates through a chain of increasingly dark-comic encounters across a city, each stop ratcheting the protagonist deeper into catastrophe.
- Falling Down (1993) — A man treating one terminal-feeling day as license to settle every score, moving station-to-station through confrontations with figures from his life — the grievance-errand spine of the second act.
- In Bruges (2008) — Nearly the same machine: two men, one actively suicidal, guns and guilt between them, achieving comedy and grief in the same breath through banter that keeps detonating into real stakes.
- World's Greatest Dad (2009) — A comedian-turned-director using suicide as the black-comic engine, exercising the tonal control needed to keep an audience laughing at material designed to be unbearable.
- Sightseers (2012) — A deadpan day-out that curdles into a killing spree, balancing cozy banality against sudden violence — the same trick of housing atrocity inside mundane companionable rhythms.
- The Climb (2019) — Male-friendship two-hander built from episodic reunions where affection and betrayal are inseparable, played in a dry register that finds comedy in men failing to say what they mean.
- James White (2015) — Christopher Abbott's live-wire, all-nerves lead performance in a raw American-indie register of caretaking and breakdown — the exact volatile mode he brings as Kevin.
- Uncut Gems (2019) — The anxiety-attack performance style and ticking-clock escalation of a man cornering himself over a single stretch of time, sustaining dread and comic desperation simultaneously.
- Punch-Drunk Love (2002) — Recasts a comedian in a dramatic key, letting live-wire rage and fragility surface through a deadpan-absurd tone — the register shift that lets a comic actor carry mental-illness material.
- Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) — Deadpan indie that literalizes a suicide pact as premise and mines it for wry comedy, pairing two damaged travelers on an episodic road structure toward a choice about living.