Mark Reviews Movies: SUICIDE FOR BEGINNERS

Suicide for Beginners, Vertical Entertainment

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 5, 2022

To call Suicide for Beginners distasteful would be accurate, but the description might also give one the wrong impression. This movie is, after all, about a man who attempts to stage the murder of a woman with whom he is obsessed as a suicide, and co-screenwriters Craig Thieman, who also directed, and Ethan Hunter play it out as a comedy of errors. It's inherently in bad taste, which is the point, but the approach to this material is so confused that its nastiness is near the bottom of the movie's issues.

At the top of that list, perhaps, is the matter of the story's perspective. It follows Garrett (Wil Daniels), who has bound and gagged Mia (Sara Tomko) in the basement of her rented home, seemingly because she started dating his roommate. There's a bit more to his motivation, although it's really a distinction without much of a difference. The guy wants to be Mia, and since she has no interest in him, she is, in his mind, completely disposable.

Putting the intrinsic and obvious sexism aside, the filmmakers do at least acknowledge that Garrett is a creep, a misogynist (as well as a misanthrope), and a generally terrible person. That constantly forces one to wonder about the thinking of Thieman and Hunter telling their story from his point of view.

The attempted humor of this scenario is how Garrett's incompetence in killing Mia leads him to end up abducting and/or murdering multiple other people. The other potential victims include pizza delivery man Rick (Nate Panning), who suspects Garrett is suicidal, and his girlfriend Abigail (Julia Lehman), who wants to help the "poor" stranger. The late Sid Haig is amusing in his final role as Mia's landlord with an uncertain accent who also ends up in the basement, but that's where the actual comedy ends.

Where is the joke in this premise? It's certainly not in dissecting or satirizing Garrett's willingness to see himself as the hero and the wronged victim in this situation. Again, the filmmakers know he's the villain here, as one of several flashbacks sees him breaking into Mia's bedroom to leave her flowers and to sniff her underwear, before ending up under the bed while she and her boyfriend/Garrett's roommate Ben (Christian Rozakis) have sex.

The punch line is the awkwardness of that result, but the setup to that gag only works if we can sympathize with or generally understand Garrett's silent humiliation. Since he's the one in the wrong (There's something to the fact that the filmmakers had to add the panty-sniffing, as if the initial invasion into the bedroom isn't enough of a marker of his creepiness), the gag doesn't function, either on its own or as some twist on the notion of our inherent connection to a sad-sack guy like Garrett.

The rest of the story, obviously, possesses the same troublesome context and, as a result, the same ineffective method. As more and more people end up tied up and gagged in the basement, Garrett has to find a way to resolve his multiple counts of kidnapping, ideally without killing anyone who isn't the woman who doesn't have feelings for him. The abductees—all of them stupid, irritating, and/or a bit weird, save for Mia, who's about as much an object in the movie as she is in Garrett's mind—and abductor banter and bicker with an unconvincing degree of self-awareness.

Theiman and Hunter seem to be trapped in a pattern of repetition, as the arguing continues and flashbacks gradually reveal the actual reason Garrett wants Mia dead (to cover up another crime, which only happened because of his sense of entitlement toward her). The delaying, perhaps, is because they've written themselves into this inescapable situation. A random string of brutal murders in broad daylight on a conveniently busy-but-not-too-much-so suburban street is somehow the bloody chaos we expect from the setup, a random and inconsequential occurrence within the plot, and fairly clear proof that the filmmakers don't know what to do with the predicament in the basement.

Yes, Suicide for Beginners is unpleasant on a few levels. While that might give one the impression that this is some morbid and macabre comedy, the movie's biggest offense is how it's cluttered approach results in something too uncertain to be offensive.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products