Dead in a Week (Or Your Mon­ey Back)

Par­ents often express mild con­ster­na­tion at exam boards who force their beloved chil­dren to blind­ly par­rot facts rather than to devel­op their own voice and ideas. Dead in a Week (Or Your Mon­ey Back), the debut fea­ture film by Tom Edmunds, feels like the prod­uct of a par­tic­u­lar­ly strin­gent exam board which requires every time­worn movie con­ven­tion present and account­ed for before they’ll sign off with a pass­ing mark.

We’ve got the fop­pish, depres­sive rogue with tou­sled black hair in Aneurin Barnard’s depres­sive wannabe author, William. The feisty love inter­est in Freya Mavor’s out­spo­ken lit­er­ary edi­tor, Ellie. The lov­able old­ster with a shady back­sto­ry in Tom Wilkinson’s Leslie. And much sil­ly humour which draws on Hol­ly­wood namecheck­ing and gen­tle mock­ery of parochial Eng­lish manners.

The film’s some­what flim­sy con­ceit pro­pos­es a world in which the occu­pa­tion of assas­sin is less a case of danc­ing between the shad­ows and depos­ing world lead­ers with an immac­u­late­ly aimed sniper’s bul­let, and more like work­ing in a call cen­tre sell­ing dou­ble glaz­ing. Each month, you solic­it busi­ness from poten­tial clients, and you must exceed your tar­get before being allowed to stay on.

Old hand Leslie has tak­en to stalk­ing sui­cide hotspots in order to reach his goals, offer­ing his ser­vices to those about to end it all. It’s there he meets William, and is able to sign off a deal that he’ll be mur­dered some time in the com­ing week. But as soon as our fraz­zled hero has reck­less­ly signed his life away, his dire sit­u­a­tion takes a sharp turn for the sen­ti­men­tal­ly life affirming.

It does what it needs to do at all times, even if the var­i­ous twists are vis­i­ble from sev­er­al lightyears away. Edmunds doesn’t quite do enough to make you real­ly care whether William is even­tu­al­ly whacked out, but as the sto­ry gen­tly put­ters on, it becomes clear that Leslie is the cen­tral focus, and it’s all about the mor­tal fear of being put out to pro­fes­sion­al pas­ture. Despite his lov­ing mar­riage to cro­chet mae­stro Pen­ny (a scene-steal­ing Mar­i­on Bai­ley), he feels as if life will lose all of its pleas­ant struc­ture if he no longer has a rea­son to get up in the morning.

Yet, as var­i­ous antag­o­nists enter the fray (Christo­pher Eccle­ston going full geezer-core), it turns out there’s still some puff in the old boy yet. A sol­id, fit­ful­ly charm­ing call­ing card movie, but sad­ly noth­ing more than that.