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Runtime: 83 mins
Directed by: #ChrisBavota, #LeePaulaSpringer
Starring: #HestonHorwin, #JillianHarris, #MattKeyes, #KristinaSandev
Grimmfest Feature by: Darren Tilby
Synopsis: After Becca receives a distressing call from her suicidal brother Richie, she rushes over to his apartment and finds him alive and well – surrounded by copies of his own dead body.
Grimmfest say: A masterclass in small-scale, high-concept filmmaking, this dazzling debut feature is a real charmer. Combining the low-fi, limited location quirkiness of cult Grimmfest favourite DAVE MADE A MAZE, with the surrealism and metaphysical weight of Charlie Kaufman, this is, for all of its crackling witty dialogue, droll black humour and delirious daftness, at heart a very serious and ultimately rather heartbreaking film about emotional interdependence and despair, which explores the way in which clinical depressives (fail to) interact with the world. It’s beautifully played by the three leads, genuinely startling in some of its narrative twists and visual coups, and delivers an emotionally wrenching final scene that manages to be both jaw-droppingly unexpected and yet all-too-painfully inevitable.
What I'm expecting: From my understanding, Dead Dicks is about mental illness, so it’s already got its work cut out for it. Black humour is a difficult thing to get right at the best of times: balancing the comedy and gravitas of such films can be a real tightrope act. But with subjects like mental illness, films have a responsibility to treat them with great care and respect. This is my biggest concerns here. However, all being well, we should get a film whose humour is perhaps not laugh-out-loud funny, but rather understated, clever, and with depth; and whose core theme is poignant, heartfelt, and, more importantly, sensitively handled.
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