On the Count of Three
2022 · Jerrod Carmichael
For when you want a comedy with real stakes — something short, sharp, and honest about the dark stuff, that makes you laugh and then sit quietly with someone you love. A challenge wrapped in the pace of a caper; skip it if the subject is raw for you right now.
What it's about
Val has decided today is his last day alive, and he wants company: his best friend Kevin, freshly out of the hospital after his own failed attempt, agrees to a pact — but not before the two spend one final day settling scores. What follows is an errand run through mulch yards, dirt-bike tracks, and the doorsteps of men who owe them an apology, two friends with pistols and nothing left to lose.
The experience
Jittery, mordant, and startlingly funny — the jokes never defuse the despair and the despair never swallows the jokes, so you spend the whole film laughing with a knot in your stomach. It moves fast, like a countdown, and it's tender in ways you don't see coming.
Performances
Christopher Abbott plays Kevin as a live wire, volatile and heartbreaking in the same breath, while Jerrod Carmichael counters with an eerie, deadpan stillness — the friction between them is the movie.
The craft
Carmichael's directorial debut runs on tonal control that almost nothing on this subject has managed: Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch's script won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, and it earns every laugh without cheapening the pain. The film is lean and handheld-restless, built around two faces and one long day.
Why it matters
It announced Carmichael as a filmmaker as formally daring as his stand-up, and became a touchstone for how comedy can look directly at suicide and depression without flinching or preaching.
Reception & legacy: how On the Count of Three was received, argued over, and remembered →
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.