A Film With a Killer Turn, Seen at Dom Radio

I love Dom Radio for showing films you can't see anywhere else, for nothing. Which is also the problem.

This one had a genuinely good turn in it, and it worked purely on the room's reaction. The film ends about halfway through — for one person, at least. Credits. Fine, we're not the first to run credits at the thirty-minute mark, but here it was earned: one kind of life, the kind with people in it, was over, and after the credits it goes into pure Thornton Wilder — that same "Our Town." The catch is that a concept is only a concept; you still have to be able to land it.

The story, roughly: an elderly couple living modestly, she works at a church, he tends bar in the evenings. They seem happy together. Then she decides, out of nowhere, to spend everything her husband had been putting aside for forty years toward their first trip to the mountains — on flowers. She's paid back for it: she dies perfectly happy, driving into a pond in a car packed with them. I'm flattening it, but that's the shape.

That's where the credits come, people start leaving, and the programmer has to run out and explain that this isn't the end, please come back. Then the waiting room for the afterlife begins, with all the comic detail you'd expect.

The speaker effect saying "connected" finished me. An angel-agent turns up for her, reads out the same script everyone dying gets, and offers a choice — standard ascension or premium, exactly as in life. And it's read over the sound of a line connecting, which is where the "connected" from the opening finally pays off.

An independent film made for nothing, with excellent humour, black in places, and good taste with it: the black comedy never slides into ordinary comedy, the craft holds, and some of the jokes are properly clever. I came out entirely satisfied — an impression not even the Zielinski on my hands could beat. I always wash my hands at Dom Radio; that's the bottle they keep there, and I like the smell.