A Film With Me In It

Dylan Moran

Beyond Home Entertainment

R4 DVD

Dylan Moran, brooding Irish Comedian and star of Black Books stars in the dark and edgy comedy, A Film With Me It. It is a film about two no hopers, failing actor Mark (Mark Doherty) and screenwriter part alcoholic Pierce (Dylan Moran). They both live in a set of broken-down units making the best of their none-too successful lives until a serious of accidents changes everything, for both better and worse. It is all set up in the early scenes where we note various problems appearing in the unit central to the tale. The chandelier is loose, the bathroom door handle keeps falling off, the window plane slams shut, the plaster is loose and so on. These problems don’t seem major until Mark’s life begins to fall apart.

His girlfriend leaves him and as he muses over his future a cupboard falls from the wall and kills her dog, this causes a chain of events which involve a series of fatal accidents. The first is when the chandelier falls killing his disabled brother, a scene which is both tragic and terribly funny. Just as Mark is reeling over his brother’s death the landlord arrives to fix the broken light in the kitchen. As he stands on a wobbly stool it crashes to the ground and the screwdriver he is holding is driven through his throat. Accident it may be; but it doesn’t look good since Mark owed three months recent and posthumously learns that his girlfriend was having an affair with the landlord.

As his girlfriend comes to pack her gear, she finds Mark’s brothers dead body and faints, landing on his clarinet spike resulting in her death as well. The bodies are piling up. As Mark and Pierce try to work out what to do (with a number of harebrained schemes), a police woman arrives. She is actually only there to discuss with Mark a complaint about the noise of his clarinet, but Pierce bangs her on the head with a shovel. She comes too taped to a wheelchair and clearly doesn’t believe the story they are telling. However when she cries to escape the window slams shut and kills her !

This is an outrageous black comedy with wickedly funny dialogue, a dry sense of wit and a sense of the ridiculous that Dylan Moran does so well. Yes it is absurd but it works so well. It is even more amusing as they work out a ruse which fools the police and together they make a fortune from a screenplay based on the crime.

This is a dark and witty celebration of the macabre twists of fate which can only occur in the Irish yarn. It is the ultimate tall tale. Marvellous.

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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.6 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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