It’s hard to think of anything less amusing than watching someone you love gasp their last breath of life. Yet, in the opening of Other People, film-maker Chris Kelly manages to turn that searing scene into the stuff of scream-out-loud comedy. Like a lot of humor of the darkest hue, success pivots on the juxtaposition between the monumental and the mundane – in this case involving mortality and a mixed-up Taco Bell order.
The plot of Kelly’s debut film, which was released in 2016, centers on a struggling and downcast comedy writer (played by Jesse Plemons), who reluctantly returns to the place where he grew up, Sacramento, California, to help his sisters and father care for their cancer-ravaged matriarch (the iridescent Molly Shannon). The opening scene makes her tragic fate clear. The rest of the film chronicles the year-long lead-up.
