Critique of the Count of Three: Jerrod Carmichael’s Killer Friend Comedy

Jerrod Carmichael’s “On the Count of Three” is not very heavy on the kind of koan jokes that always lent his velvet punch confrontation comedy, but this one – delivered in the first minutes of his suicide – dark, but violently Sweet directorial debut – it resonates loud enough to echo in the rest of the film: “When you’re a child, they say the worst thing in life is to be a quitter. Why? Giving up is incredible. It just means that you should stop doing something you hate. “

Best friends Val (Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) are ready to give up. The first time we see them, they are standing in the parking lot outside a strip club in upstate New York at 10:30 am with revolvers pointed at each other’s heads, as part of a double suicide pact. No one is laughing, but you can already feel the love between them; something in his eyes looks more like “sisters who are pregnant at the same time” than “strangers who are about to shoot each other in the face”.

If this sounds like a simplistic way to start a movie – especially a death-obsessed comedy of friends about depression – it’s just because you still don’t know these guys. This is not just a cheap blow from the edge, either in front of or behind the camera. The specifics of their exit strategy may have come about on a whim, but Val and Kevin have been sinking in this moment for a long time, and there is almost something harmonious about how they arrived in perfect unison in this place where facing the future is more frightening than the perspective of not having one.

They take their lives seriously enough that we respect why they want to take their lives, and so does the masterfully calibrated film around them. Working from a script by his longtime collaborators Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch (whose ability to find narrative accuracy amid chaos in motion is one of the many ways this project appears to be related to the Safdie brothers), Carmichael turns the clock back some hours. From that cold opening, he discharges a sensitive but improbably amusing story, which flourishes in the contradictions behind a friendship so beautiful that both parties want to end it. A small film that makes big oscillations with eyes wide open and never dares to be prescriptive, “On the Count of Three” finds humor in despair, reason in futility, pathos in Papa Roach’s music and – most shocking of all – a timer of a comic performance in Christopher Abbott.

Not that Abbott fails to bring any intensity of his signature to the table here. At the very least, Kevin feels like borderline self-parody work at first. Swinging an unfortunate combination of dark beard and dyed blond hair that inspires a character to consider him a “son of a bitch with ramen noodle head”, Kevin is involuntarily admitted to a mental health center at the beginning of this story, and only a few days removed from his most recent suicide attempt. Needless to say, he is not optimistic about any treatment they might try next: “If any of you knew how to help me now, you would have done it!” he screams, and he may be right about that.

Valentino Watson does not share the same dark history of child sexual abuse, but he has many of his own demons to deal with and seems even more committed to killing himself than his friend. His instinctive reaction to getting a promotion at the mulch factory where he works is to hang himself by his belt in the office bathroom.

This plan is abandoned by a better one: Val is going to take Kevin out of the clinic for an appropriate farewell. Kevin agrees with the first part, but refuses in the second. What if, he proposes, they give themselves 24 hours to play with the house money and use all their unspent livelihood? One day of borrowed time, and then they’ll pull the triggers. Great. But what the boys might initially imagine as some kind of ultra-nihilistic riff on “The Bucket List” gradually blooms into a discreet crazy misadventure that looks more like an emotionally released game of “Grand Theft Auto” than anything else, like Kevin and Val discover that the promise of a mutual suicide pact has a funny way of inspiring people to “stop getting in their fucking way.” Of course, this movie is sometimes powerful on the nose, but you won’t spend the last day of your life being subtle.

And, without losing sight of its deadly serious risks, “On the Count of Three” is very funny. Abbott and Carmichael love their characters as much as their characters love each other. Kevin and Val can be disturbed and self-annihilate, but they are not stupid, and the actors never minimize these guys to find the contagious joy of breaking all the rules of life that have always been conditioned to follow (ie: that you need to to continue living). That’s where most of the laughter comes from, as Kevin’s plan to murder the doctor who molested him as a child leaves him intrigued by the utter ridicule of being allowed – even encouraged! – having a gun in a country where people insist that all life is sacred. This is another contradiction. The same is true of the fact that your attacker has left you the only piece of advice that can be powerful enough to keep you off the cliff.

Carmichael does not escape from this mess. That was never his style, either standing or at The Carmichael Show. His natural confidence as a director becomes more and more evident as “On the Count of Three” expands and expands its scope to include car chases and shootings, but he also never had more support than here, with the versatile soundtrack of Owen Pallett (who always helps the film look 10 times bigger than it is) for Marshall Adams’ honest but flexible cinematography, which presents the bleak twilight of a New York winter with the dizzying feeling that a police thriller can burst at any time.

But “On the Count of Three” can afford to dare to draw the line between comedy and desolation because of how Abbott and Carmichael work together. Like a Russian roulette game, this is a movie that would have looked embarrassingly stupid if things went wrong. It is a dangerous and somewhat enjoyable film that dances around the edge of an open wound from start to finish, as it risks making light the heavier things that so many of your viewers will have to carry. But it is exhilarating – a little at first, and then a lot – to see these characters find the kind of happiness that is worth dying for.

Grade A-

“On the Count of Three” debuted in the US Dramatic Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution in the United States.

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