Jer­rod Carmichael braces for the end in the red-band On the Count of Three trailer

As the old actor’s adage goes, dying is easy but com­e­dy is very hard — and doing both at once, as sug­gest­ed by the new film On the Count of Three, is near­ly impos­si­ble. The upcom­ing black com­e­dy takes on a del­i­cate tightwire-walk in its search for the wry humor with­in a bleak sit­u­a­tion: a pair of chron­i­cal­ly depressed friends, ground down by the accu­mu­la­tion of life’s many lit­tle indig­ni­ties, joint­ly decide to take their own lives.

A red­band trail­er for the fea­ture direct­ing debut from Jer­rod Carmichael (cur­rent­ly enjoy­ing a wave of pos­i­tive press for his con­fes­sion­al stand-up spe­cial Rothaniel) arrived online this morn­ing, and showed how he’s nav­i­gat­ed a top­ic so sen­si­tive that the video link below must be brack­et­ed by dis­claimer mes­sages about help­ing those with sui­ci­dal ideation find the sup­port they need. The dicey sub­ject mat­ter may have spooked dis­trib­u­tor Anna­pur­na — the film has been on the shelf for near­ly a year and a half since its pre­mière at Sun­dance 2021, and hasn’t been pro­mot­ed all that aggres­sive­ly — but there’s a rare frank­ness in its wry atti­tude toward death.

For starters, the trail­er opens with a sol­id joke about the painful obvi­ous­ness of lis­ten­ing to ​“Cut My Life Into Pieces” by Papa Roach as an over­ture to killing your­self. It’s a tone-set­ter for the rest of the trail­er, which sees awk­ward moments of lev­i­ty aris­ing out of a failed effort at rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with an ex (Tiffany Had­dish) and squab­bling over who gets to actu­al­ly utter the last words before Val (Carmichael) and Kevin (Christo­pher Abbott) shoot one anoth­er in the head.

Our own Han­nah Strong was on the scene at Sun­dance last year, and had a strong response to the film’s engage­ment with a third rail most wouldn’t dare touch. “…the two cen­tral per­for­mances are com­pelling, and an explo­ration of male men­tal health and sui­cide feels time­ly and impor­tant,” she wrote in her review. ​“But the com­ic glib­ness with which On the Count of Three starts isn’t main­tained, and the end­ing feels like a betray­al of char­ac­ters who we were just start­ing to care about.”

In any case, it’s reward­ing to see Carmichael — who will appear lat­er this year in Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos‘ new film Poor Things, and with Chris Abbott, odd­ly enough — unveil­ing his own direc­to­r­i­al sen­si­bil­i­ty with­out con­cern over com­mer­cial via­bil­i­ty. Sun­dance could always use a lit­tle more of that, trig­ger warn­ings and all.