86 min | R | May 13, 2022 | Orion Pictures
Two best friends make a pact to kill each other by the end of the day, then go spend their last hours settling scores. Jerrod Carmichael turns a suicide pact into a buddy comedy and refuses to apologize for it. It is the funniest movie ever made about wanting to die.
Val and Kevin are best friends who decide to die together. Kevin sits in a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt. Val pulls him out, hands him a gun, and proposes a pact. They will spend one last day settling scores and then kill each other at sundown. On the Count of Three is a film about the strange freedom of a man who has stopped pretending he wants to live.
Jerrod Carmichael plays Val with a flat, unhurried calm that reads as peace. He has decided to die, and the decision has emptied him of anxiety. Christopher Abbott plays Kevin as his opposite. Kevin shakes and spirals and talks too fast, and Abbott makes the manic energy feel like a man clawing at something he cannot name. Henry Winkler plays Dr. Brenner, Kevin’s childhood therapist, with a polished therapeutic warmth that curdles the moment Kevin confronts him. Tiffany Haddish plays Natasha, Val’s girlfriend, and strips out the comic timing that made her famous to find a woman who knows something is wrong.
Jerrod Carmichael directs his first feature with the discipline the material demands. The script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch structures the day as a road trip through unfinished business. Each stop is a confrontation Val or Kevin has been avoiding, and the film moves between them with the loose rhythm of two friends with nowhere to be. Carmichael lets scenes run long enough for a joke to settle into silence and the silence to settle into dread. The handheld camera stays close and unglamorous, framing the day in the flat light of strip malls and parking lots. Nothing about the look insists on tragedy, which is what makes the tragedy land.
On the Count of Three wants to make you laugh at two men planning to die and then refuses to let the laughter off the hook. The tightrope walk does not always hold. Some of the confrontations resolve too neatly for a film this committed to discomfort. What survives is the central friendship and a willingness to treat despair as something other than a problem with a solution. Carmichael has made a debut that trusts an audience to sit inside a feeling most films rush to fix.