'Dead In A Week (Or Your Money Back)' Offers Gallows Humor And Plenty Of Laughs

Life. Oh, what’s the point of it all? Stuck in a daily grind doing menial jobs we can’t stand with coworkers we hate just to pay the bills. Faceless corporations manipulating our every waking hour through advertising, television, social media, price gouging and political propaganda. Even the daily news is a masochist’s wet dream: murder, rape, corruption, war, famine, disease, natural disasters, environmental destruction. Life’s miseries seemingly have no end. But end they do, of course, for each and every one of us. Death’s stark inevitability produces raw existential dread in many. But should it? As William, the central figure in the pitch-black British comedy Dead In A Week (Or Your Money Back) glumly notes, “Death is the one thing we all have in common.”

For poor William (Aneurin Barnard), existence has become suffocated by banality. A frustrated, unpublished writer, despair has consumed him to such a degree that he’s made multiple suicide attempts, only to meet with dismal failure every time. One dreary evening, while attempting a fatal leap from Chelsea Bridge, he’s approached by Leslie (Tom Wilkinson), an aging hitman who makes William an unusual proposition: take a contract out on his own life and allow Leslie to accomplish what he himself cannot. Attracted by the notion of a quick and painless demise (the only one of Leslie’s proffered death scenarios he can afford), William scrounges up the necessary funds, and fully expects that within the next seven days he will be offed with a bullet to the head when he least expects it. Until then he’s to go about his normal routine, which he does…until he receives a phone call from Ellie (Freya Mavor), the bright young assistant editor at a publishing house suddenly enthusiastic about one of William’s manuscripts. With newfound hope, William tries to cancel the hit, but Leslie, teetering on the verge of forced retirement by the British Guild of Assassins’ officious boss Harvey (a gleefully droll Christopher Eccleston), refuses. When William goes on the run with Ellie in tow, a comedy of errors ensues as Leslie racks up an unintentional body count pursuing them.

Originally released in 2017 (and free to stream on Tubi), Dead In A Week’s closest kissing cinematic cousin is the underrated 1997 John Cusack-as-a-hitman gem Grosse Point Blank. Like that movie, Dead In A Week blends the sweetness of a (very) unorthodox rom-com with richly awkward odd-couple dynamics. As the straight man of the piece, Barnard’s William resembles a nervous, navel-gazing Ian Curtis (a doubtlessly intentional nod considering the Joy Division singer’s 1980 suicide at age twenty-three), but his half-arsed self-destructive tendencies are, as Leslie points out, merely an extension of a casual attitude towards life in general. In contrast, Leslie is eccentric but focused, a hard worker who takes pride in his murderous occupation and his particular proclivity for it. But underneath that professional exterior, Leslie’s anxieties—about aging and the bland idleness of retirement—are every bit as real and debilitating as William’s.

Writer-director Tom Edmunds’ feisty screenplay abounds with rapid-fire energy and dialogue, yet he’s careful never to let the escalating mayhem devolve into farce. His reverence for classic dry British wit exists even in throwaway gags (the ultra-ordinary office atmosphere of Assassin’s Guild headquarters, Leslie’s copiously-illustrated hitman’s brochure, William’s post-it doodles detailing ever-more convoluted ways to kill himself), and in characters such as Leslie’s doting, pillow-embroidering wife Penny (Marion Bailey), who’s acutely aware of her husband’s line of employment. But Dead In A Week is a comedy that understands its own dark heart, and treats the tense scenes with appropriate respect (the under-the-table standoff between Leslie and Harvey is especially nerve-wracking), which genuinely makes the audience wonder whether William—or Leslie, for that matter—will make it out alive.

While Edmunds’ gallows humor may seem overly-morbid to some and tacky to others, with its quirky concept, likable cast and madcap antics, Dead In A Week (Or Your Money Back) handily earns a 4 (out of 5) on my Fang Scale. With laughs like these available, maybe this living thing isn’t so bad after all.