Directed by Jerrod Carmichael
Written by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch
Starring Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Abbott, and Tiffany Haddish
Rated R
Runtime: 1 hour 26 minutes
In Select theaters and digital May 13

by Audrey Callerstrom, Associate Editor and Staff Writer

Trailers for On the Count of Three, the directorial debut of standup comedian/actor Jerrod Carmichael, include a content warning, as well as a hotline number for suicide prevention. This is the first time I’ve seen a message of this sort before a film’s trailer and not, for example, at the end of an episode of a CW show. I think this heightened sense of how people receive a message is for the greater good. For me in particular, I didn’t find this film particularly triggering, but of course, your mileage may vary.

On the Count of Three stars Jerrod Carmichael and Christopher Abbott as Val and Kevin, respectively, two childhood friends in New Jersey at a crossroads in their lives. When we first meet Kevin, he is in inpatient treatment for depression and a suicide attempt. Eager to leave the hospital and its banal routines, he insists he’s fine, he doesn’t belong there, other people probably need more help than he does. “I feel lucky to be alive,” Kevin says flatly. The social worker doesn’t buy it - Kevin attempted suicide by ingesting pills a few days earlier. Val visits Kevin, and they make a swift escape. But it’s not a joyful one. When Val found out that Kevin attempted suicide, he tells Kevin, he didn’t feel sad. He felt relieved. He thought, man, you can just end it all? It felt like the perfect solution to Val’s problems. He feels ambivalent about his girlfriend Tash (Tiffany Haddish) and utterly bored and sick of his job working at a feed and seed supply store. Val cannot keep faking his way through things like trying to have a reaction to being promoted to selling mulch. So Val has a proposition: using handguns that Val procured, Val and Kevin will each shoot the other. Best friends, going down together. But one of them isn’t ready and pushes the gun away at the last second, so the friends agree to one last day.

But this isn’t The Bucket List, so don’t expect these two men to go around making amends or skydiving. Val and Kevin both have a dark past they want to confront. For Val, it’s his abusive dad, played by JB Smoove. For Kevin, it’s a therapist (Henry Winkler) he had as a little boy who sexually abused him. If this were a film where both characters realized that, doggonit, life sure is a wonderful thing, then I must direct you to the aforementioned trigger warning. But given the film’s timeline - it all takes place in a day, roughly - and the need to move the characters from one place to the next, we’re spared some conversations or moments that might help us understand these two men a little better. They do fully feel like childhood friends, though. Carmichael and Abbott have an ease with each other, and they look and act like they have shared memories. We can tell that Kevin is more sincere and emotional, and Val prefers to leave things unsaid. They play off each other really well, like when Kevin wants to play “Last Resort” by Papa Roach in the car. Val tells him that playing a song that is about the very thing they’re about to do is very corny. “I don’t listen to Alanis Morrissette after a breakup,” he says.

Carmichael does have fun with much needed moments of levity, like when a receptionist cheerfully offers Val and Kevin, grown men, a sucker from a bowl of Dum-Dums, or when a Big Mouth Billy Bass goes off during a fight scene. On the Count of Three’s biggest fault, in addition to not being able to stay in one scene for very long, is that Val is the main character instead of Kevin. Kevin’s struggle in particular could shed some light on people with treatment-resistant depression, people who work really hard to get better and try everything. That work is invisible. Kevin names all his treatments: “CBT, DBT, ECT… If something would have worked, don’t you think I would have found it by now?” Abbott is endearing and funny as the sensitive Kevin, who is holding on by a thread. Meanwhile, Val is more stoic and disconnected. On the Count of Three can be bold and quite funny, but not having Kevin at its center and giving Abbott more screen time seems like a missed opportunity. Not to mention the tacked-on unnecessary final scene that seems tacked-on as an afterthought (and a demand of the studio, to be sure).