Jerrod Carmichael’s “On the Count of Three” is not very heavy on the kind of koan-like jokes that always gave his confrontational stand-up comedy its velvet beat, but this – which was delivered in the first minutes of his suicidal but violent. sweet debut as a director – echoes loud enough to resonate throughout the rest of the film: ‘If you’re a kid, they tell you that the worst thing in life is to be a stop. Why? Stopping is incredible. It just means you stop doing something you hate. ‘
Lifelong best friends Val (Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) are both ready to give up. The first time we see them, they are standing in the parking lot outside a strip club in New York at 10:30 a.m. with handguns aimed at each other’s heads as part of a double suicide pact. No one laughs, but you feel all the love between them; something about the look in their eyes reads more like ‘sisters who are pregnant at the same time’ than ‘strangers who are about to shoot each other in the face’.
If it feels like a great way to start a movie – especially a death knell comedy about depression – it’s just because you do not know these guys yet. This is not just a cheap rand-lord stunt, in front of or behind the camera. The details of their exit strategy may have come together on a whim, but Val and Kevin sank long after this moment, and there is almost something harmonious about how they arrived at this place in such perfect unanimity the future is scarier than the prospect to not have one.
They take their lives seriously enough so that we can respect why they want to take their lives at all, and so does the masterfully calibrated film around them. Carmichael works from a screenplay by his longtime collaborators Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch (whose ability to find narrative precision through freewheeling chaos is one of the different ways this project feels related to the Safdie brothers). From that cold open he unleashes a sensitive but improbably fun story that thrives on the contradictions behind a friendship that is so beautiful that both parties want to end it with bullets. A small film that makes some big swings with its 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 – an all-timer of a comic performance in Christopher Abbott.
Not that Abbott fails to bring some of his signature intensity to the table. If anything, Kevin first feels like a frontier of self-parody. While rocking an unfortunate dark beard and colored blonde hair combo that inspires one character to nail him as a “ramen noodle-head motherfucker,” Kevin is involuntarily committed to a mental health facility at the chronological beginning of this story, and just a few days away from his most recent suicide attempt. Needless to say, he is not optimistic about what treatment they would try: “If any of you now knew how to help me, you would have fucked done it!” he shouts, and may have a point there.
Valentino Watson does not share the same grim history of child abuse, but he has many of his own demons to deal with, and seems even more committed to killing himself than his partner does. His reaction to the gut to get promotion at the coating factory where he works is to hang himself on his belt in the office bathroom.
The plan is abandoned for a better plan: Fall will break Kevin out of the clinic for a proper farewell. Kevin goes with the first part, then balks the second part. What happens if he, he suggests, gives themselves 24 hours to play with house money and use all their unspent money? One day borrowed time, and then they pull the triggers. Big. But what the boys would initially imagine as a kind of ultra-nihilistic riff on ‘The Bucket List’ gradually turns into a low-key screwball misadure that plays more like an emotionally liberated game of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ than anything otherwise, as Kevin and Val find that the promise of a mutual suicide pact has a funny way of inspiring people to ‘stop standing in their own fucking way’. Sure, this movie is mighty on the nose at times, but you are not going to spend the last day of your life subtly.
And without losing sight of the deadly serious interests, ‘On the Count of Three’ is very funny. Abbott and Carmichael love their characters just as much as they love their characters. Kevin and Val may be upset and self-destructive, but they are not stupid, and the actors never play down on these guys to find the infectious joy of breaking all the rules of life to which they are always conditioned (namely: that you must keep living). This is where most of the laughter comes from, because Kevin’s plan to kill the doctor who molested him as a child amazes him at the ridiculousness of being admitted – even encouraged! – to own a gun in a country where people insist that every life is sacred. This is another contradiction. So is the fact that his abuser gave him the only advice that would be powerful enough to pull him back from the edge.
Carmichael does not shy away from this mess. This has never been his style, whether in his standup or in ‘The Carmichael Show’. His natural self-confidence as a director only becomes clearer as “On the Count of Three” increases and its scope increases to chases and shootings, but he also never had more support than here, from Owen Pallett’s versatile score (which helps the film always to feel ten times bigger than it is) for Marshall Adams’ honest but flexible cinematography, which gives the gloom of a New York winter with the gloomy feeling that a crime thriller could break out at any moment.
But ‘On the Count of Three’ may finally give the nod to the needle between comedy and desolation due to the way Abbott and Carmichael work together. Like a Russian roulette, it’s a movie that would have looked embarrassingly stupid if things had gone wrong. It is a dangerous and somehow pleasing film that dances around the edge of an open wound from start to finish as it has to lift the heaviest things that so many of its viewers will ever have to carry. But it’s exciting – first a little and then a hell of a lot – to see how these characters find the kind of happiness worth dying for.
Grade: A-
‘On the Count of Three’ premiered in the American drama competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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