Broken bones, lots of blood and no sympathy: this meeting with the would-be in-laws is a bitingly funny escapade of violence. Today the FSK-18 insider tip “Why Don’t You Just Die!” is on TV.
A married couple, their apartment with ugly patterned, slightly yellowed wallpaper and, as an unexpected visit, the nervous boyfriend of the unpredictable daughter: Sounds like the start of a family comedy along the lines of “My bride, her father and I”? Maybe, but it’s actually the violent comedy Why Don’t You Just Die!
The FSK 18 film is an insider tip worth seeing, especially for fans of Tarantinoesque dialogue duels that lead to rough violence and macabre humor. Tonight, February 16, 2023, “Why Don’t You Just Die!” will be broadcast from 11:45 p.m. on Tele 5. The film is also available as a VOD, including on Prime Video – if you have a Prime Channel subscription Home of Horror you can even see it at no extra cost!
» “Why Don’t You Just Die!” bei Prime Video*
“Why Don’t You Just Die!”: My girlfriend, her parents and my hammer
Andrei (Vitaliy Khaev) is a police officer, lives in an old-fashioned, kitschy Moscow apartment and, according to his daughter Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde), is the worst father in the world. Therefore, Olya asked her lover Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) to kill him. Armed with a hammer, Matvey rings the bell on Andrei’s door, and then waits for the right moment to strike at the coffee party with him and Olya’s mother Tasha (Yelena Shevchenko). But the dreams of the quickly completed assassination are brutally destroyed by Andrei’s callousness…
lies upon lies, fights, shootings, a drill misused for torture methods and Mr. father-in-law slaps his wife’s forehead disparagingly with a bitten sausage: director and author Kirill Sokolov creates the absolute opposite of an ideal family get-to-know. And even if Why Don’t You Just Die!’s basic premise sounds like it’s only fit for a memorably snappy short, it manages to whimsically stretch it without sagging.
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Because between threatening exchanges of words, powerful and painful fights and moments in which the characters bitterly fail, the filmmaker mixes his narrative again and again. Through comic and dramatic flashbacks, which are dedicated to the perspective of individual characters, this abstrusely violent conflict constantly gains new context. This means that the state of affairs is constantly being re-sorted – the narrative style of earlier Tarantino works sends its regards.
Sokolow and Tarantino also share a penchant for the musical worlds of old spaghetti westerns, which immediately lend a completely different weight to awkward, sweaty fights. Despite these parallels, one shouldn’t describe “Why Don’t You Just Die!” as a Tarantino free rider, after all Sokolow shows a too individual color of humor for that.
From the life versus dignity battle when Matvey has to lick a hair clip down a nasty bathtub drain, to the terrified-embarrassed Tasha’s constant interruptions in the flow of violence, to characters screwing up their heroic moment because they’re delirious in pain:
“Why Don’t You Just Die” is a real feast for all fans of humorous anecdotes of violence, which constantly reinvent themselves thanks to character-centric misadventures and narrative deceptions. A little tip: in good company, this ingenious back and forth between disgust, pain and malicious joy in misery ignites twice as well!
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