Addressing suicide “comedically” is one of the impossible feats in general, but most especially in film. Maybe that’s why the “suicide buddy movie” doesn’t happen too often, if ever (unless one includes the more “romantic” Harold and Maude). But the tellingly titled On the Count of Three manages to achieve the impossible in being both completely honest about the shittiness of life while also being “cute” about it.
It all starts at the moment when lifelong best friends, Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott), aim guns at each other outside of a strip club called Good Time Charlie’s at about 10:30 in the morning. Carmichael, who also directed the script by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, then cuts to earlier in the day, when Val’s thoughts of committing suicide were cemented by being promoted at his banal, soul-sucking job. Although he tries to hang himself with his belt in the employee bathroom afterward, a co-worker comes in singing Travis Tritt’s “It’s A Great Day to Be Alive,” which definitely kills the mood on Val killing himself. So he decides he’s going to “do it right” by busting Kevin, who already tried to punch his own ticket earlier that week, out of the psych ward.
Because, like Arcade Fire says, “It’s you and I/It’s do or die/Suicide mission, baby, by my side” and “I unsubscribe/This ain’t a way of life/I don’t believe the hype.” Indeed, “End of Empire I-III” and “End of Empire IV (Sagittarius A*)” might be just the sort of “on the nose” songs Kevin would play to soundtrack the duo’s last day on Earth. Instead, when he tries to opt for Papa Roach’s “Last Resort,” Val disconnects the cord and explains, “You can’t listen to music that exactly describes the emotional thing you’re going through. You know how cheesy that is?” In point of fact, music—specifically, shitty music—plays an integral role in On the Count of Three. Almost as though to underscore how un-extraordinary and mediocre life actually is, especially for the majority forced to live “conventionally.” Thus a scene in a diner that starts out with a doughy middle-aged couple followed by a cut to an elderly man with a nasal cannula eating what looks like mush as Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” plays. Val appraises the clientele around him in what can be described as stoic horror. As though, like everyone else in America, he’s come to accept the misery of it all. And yes, the U.S. is a truly miserable place that stews evermore in that misery thanks to the “rogue nation” tendencies furnished by its gun laws (or lack thereof).
Which is why, in a plot point that sounds all too familiar in the wake of the Tulsa shooting, Kevin seeks to get revenge on his childhood doctor by killing him. The difference is, it wasn’t because Dr. Brenner (Henry Winkler) fucked up his back, so much as the fact that he fucked up his mind by molesting him as a child. Yet another lost vote of confidence for the field of psychiatry (as Britney Spears would corroborate). And, seeing as how Kevin has asked Val for just one more day before they literally pull the trigger, he decides this is the “no consequences” “gift” he wants to leave behind in the world. Val replies, “Homicide’s a real fucked-up gift, Kevin.” Nonetheless, as his ride or die, he agrees to go along with the mission. And yes, after all, it’s not like he’ll be around tomorrow to feel remorse about it. An idea that On the Count of Three highlights as being both liberating and crippling. Especially when it includes getting access to a gun.
Reconciling with the high he’s been missing out on all this time while he was rallying for gun control, Kevin notes to Val as they run out of the convenience store where he just pointed his weapon at the smug clerk, “Guns are crazy! How are these legal?” A couple at one of the gas pumps regards them strangely, prompting Kevin to snap, “Read your Constitution. It’s my right to bear this arm for some reason.” And maybe that, in and of itself, is a key part of the collective aura of depression in America. The heightened sense most everyone has that their death is far more likely to happen at a moment’s notice. And with that looming notion calling into question all the more their “life’s purpose,” maybe it’s easier to feel a general weight of existential dread.
The one that Val describes so acutely when he tells Kevin about why he ghosted his girlfriend, Natasha (Tiffany Haddish), after planning to propose to her. For, at first, he was excited, thinking it was going to change his life. But then, when he gets home and really looks at the ring out of its alluring encasement in the store, he realizes, “It’s just a fucking ring. It’s not gonna change anything. It’s just gonna make shit permanent. Every day is the same. I come home from work, my girl’s there, she wants to talk. I got nothing new or interesting to say, so I fill the silence telling stories from my day, reliving moments I wish I hadn’t lived in the first fucking place.”
Even long-standing depressive Kevin is bummed out by that bleak assessment, which is really saying something. And yet, for as on board with Death as Val is at the beginning of the day, something (entirely cliché) changes by the end of it to make him want to stick around: Natasha is pregnant. Considering Val’s own father issues, which we see get real live when he goes to visit Lyndell (J. B. Smoove) that day, he knows he doesn’t want to be the same kind of shithead who would abandon his progeny. That includes checking out by way of suicide to fulfill that absenteeism.
To boot, as Kevin points out earlier in the narrative, Val has never even tried to “seek help” or get on medication. The presumed panacea for the all-consuming American disease that is capitalism (“How could you not be happy in such a system? Must be a chemical imbalance!”). So he can’t really and truly say he wants to die in the same way that Kevin can, knowing for certain after trying every drug under the sun that it never will get better.
As their death paths diverge, however, the one thing that remains patently clear is the tenderness and devotion of their friendship, a rarity in any country and something, one would think, that might help compel a person to “stick around” on this Earth. And yet, as Lana Del Rey once said, “Sometimes love is not enough,” even if The Beatles previously tried to counteract that reality with, “Love is all you need.” What they should have said, in contrast, was, “A non-oppressive, non-creatively deadening system is all you need.”
