Michael Fairbanks
Charlie Day’s biggest hurdle as a potential leading man is that any comedy scenario he finds himself in eventually becomes It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia fanfiction. His very specific manic energy and complete willingness to embarrass himself gets him typecast as the “wildcard.” The guy in the group everybody else has to watch to ensure he doesn’t accidentally kill himself. Peter Warren’s directorial debut Kill Me ingeniously takes this problem one natural step further. Here, we cannot simply laugh off our concern for Day’s wellbeing. He genuinely is a danger to himself.
We open with Jimmy (Day) waking up in a bathtub full of his blood. His wrists are slit and he is barely able to call 9-1-1. He has no idea how he got there. This is a hard pill for his family, especially his exhausted sister Alice (Aya Cash), to swallow. Jimmy attempted to take his own life in Alice’s bathtub four years prior and has since been in recovery with the help of his therapist (Giancarlo Esposito). He feels entirely discarded but finds a small ray of hope when Margot (Allison Williams), the 9-1-1 operator he spoke with, accidentally adds him on social media while snooping his profile. Latching onto this, Jimmy tracks her down and tells his story, eventually intriguing her enough to help him solve the mystery of who staged his suicide.
Kill Me is such a perfect vehicle for Charlie Day. It plays to his strengths while also giving him a more somber and authentic emotional arc to explore. It is clear early on that even if Jimmy is telling the truth about this incident, he is not well. He’s lonely, anxious and combative towards the family he believes is smothering him. These qualities are uncomfortable, but because Day has spent his entire career turning the most unhinged spirals into affable comedy, they’re also bearable. There’s also such an apparent sweetness to him. He’s so genuinely thrilled when Margot decides that she wants to spend time together. The process of putting together this nonsensical stream of clues together with her is healing in itself, both a distraction and a new opportunity for connection. Kill Me toys with our belief in Jimmy’s lucidity but we always stick with him because of Margot.
Allison Williams also does terrific work here. Margot is also a bit of an outcast, dealing with the loss of her twin sister while also drowning in one of the worst jobs imaginable. The concept of her being on board with one of her callers becoming attached could’ve easily been gross but we simply believe that these two match each other’s weirdness. When Jimmy starts ranting about how the killer left his favorite takeout dinner at the scene without spreading the green sauce on the rice like he would’ve done, Margot can barely disguise her smile. She can’t help it. She’s on board.
The supporting cast is there to dial up our concern. Aya Cash brings such intensity to Alice, a sister who is entirely done playing nice but still deeply cares. The only reason she’s not in the film more is because Jimmy’s shenanigans would be quickly shut down. In truth, he needs both her and Margot for different reasons. Giancarlo Esposito also does solid if somewhat standard work as Jimmy’s other sounding board who does his best to grit his teeth and bare Jimmy’s conspiracy theories.
Writer-director Peter Warren does what he can to spruce up Kill Me’s relatively confined settings. There’s a clear Edgar Wright influence in how Todd Zelin and Brett W Bachman’s edit is paced. Certain key actions are flashed through in quick rhythmic insert montages. Some have heavy impact (Jimmy’s projections of what his stalker might’ve done at the crime scene) and some are more mundane (the routine of pouring the green sauce on the rice is shown several times for dramatic effect). Even the fanciful opening credits sequence chock full of morbid art of a bloody Jimmy point to a filmmaker with a more outlandish side than Kill Me can truly nurture. His screenplay is well written for the most part. Comedy about mental health is always difficult to thread but Kill Me never looks down at Jimmy for being suicidal. We’re laughing in uneasy prayer that he hasn’t actually relapsed. Since the mystery is a bit nonsensical, it does have a fairly predictable conclusion, but it is satisfying enough and even ends with a bumper that casts some doubt on what we’ve seen.
The last great comedy about being suicidal was Jerrod Carmichael’s On The Count of Three. That took a much more droll and bleak approach to the subject. It got laughs from the uneasy bond that two men with suicidal tendencies share even when they decide it’s the end of the road. Kill Me is not as memorable or transgressive but that also makes it more accessible to more people who may be struggling with these issues. It still requires a dark sense of humor to enjoy but Charlie Day never lets us give up on Jimmy. Hopefully, he gets the praise he deserves for this performance and uses it as his road map going forward.
