Suicide is such sweet sorrow.
The H-Bomb: Three strangers sit at a living room table, passing around a bottle of liquor. They are members of a suicide support group who have decided to try an alternative form of therapy. Wheelchair bound Dean (Mike Baldwin) was a perfectly content landscaper who was about to marry a beautiful young woman when a mysterious ailment robbed him of the use of his legs. Richard (Will Haza) is an assholish office drone who’s just been passed over for a promotion at work, is trapped in an unhappy marriage, and has started drinking heavily as a result. Sunny (Ali Lukowski) is the obedient daughter of a fanatical Jesus freak father, who goes very astray when she meets and falls in love with a young artist who introduces her to a world outside of her previously sheltered existence.
At first, these three disparate souls seem to have nothing in common, aside from their hitting rock bottom, and their shared affection for the bottle. However, as this little group therapy session wears on, they discover that their lives are connected in more ways than they initially realized. Eventually, when the bottle itself is no longer enough, they start passing around a revolver, and a very real game of Russian Roulette commences.
If there was ever a film to reaffirm my devout lack of faith in humanity, it would be this one. Written and directed by Erik Kristopher Myers, Roulette is a compelling, if mercilessly downbeat, mosaic of misery that is easy to admire, albeit not so easy to enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, that is in no way intended as a backhanded compliment. Roulette is, across the board, an impressively well-crafted film, especially for one made on such a modest budget. Just about every aspect of the picture, particularly the lead performances, are top notch and make it worth a look, just don’t expect it to brighten your day.
To an extent, Roulette reminded me of the work of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, both in its non-linear structure as well as its sheer bleakness. In particular, it brought to mind his 2003 film 21 Grams, another tale of how the lives of three strangers are linked together by tragedy. That’s not to say, however, that Roulette is in any way deritive of that film, because it isn’t, at all. It’s a highly original work that follows it’s own path to a very unpredictable and shocking climax.
For his debut feature, Myers does quite the commendable job. Not only is his script complex and emotionally charged, but his direction is also solid. He has a strong visual eye (it’s nice to see a young director go for actual compositions instead of simply hand holding every bloody shot) and does an absolutely incredible job of amping up the intensity all the way to the film’s finale. There were a couple of minor script issues that I had, such as the scene between Dean and a psychiatrist that struck me as rather odd. What kind of fucked up shrink would talk to his patient like that? It just didn’t seem right. But such nitpicking aside, Myers does show himself to be a filmmaker with promise. I read a disappointing little blurb in the IMDb trivia section that states that Myers has sworn off of movie making after working on this film. I have no idea if that’s true, or just a bit of Internet bullshit, but if it is true, I implore him to reconsider, as he does have real potential.
As I stated earlier, the three lead performances in Roulette are terrific. Each actor inhabits their role flawlessly and brings their characters to life, which consequently makes the film more difficult to watch, as their descent into hell becomes all the more real and affecting. Even a character like Richard, who, as written, is a contemptible drunk and a douche bag, I was able to feel some iota of sympathy towards, because the actor, Haza, managed to bring out the humanity in him. Baldwin also puts in a stellar showing as Dean, a rather… confused character who isn’t quite what he seems.
Special mention, I feel, needs to be made of Ali Lukowski, who absolutely kills it as Sunny, the good little Christian girl who goes very bad. Now, at the insistence of my editor, I have to make a full disclosure here, I know Ali Lukowski. I went to college with her back in the day, and it was her involvement with Roulette that drew me to it. Now, you can think that I’m just sucking up and kissing ass with what I’m about to say, and that’s fine. You’d be dead wrong, but that’s fine. So, my disclaimer out of the way, Lukowski gives the performance of the movie. When her Sunny starts to lose her shit, she is downright harrowing. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it, Ms. Lukowski is definitely an actress to keep an eye out for.
This, oddly, brings me to a negative I have. While Lukowski is indeed fantastic, her character does something, I won’t say what, during the film’s climax, that is so fucking heinous it really affected me in an adverse way. It didn’t ruin the film, and I do ultimately believe that it was dramatically honest, but it was an act that, overall, was so entirely unpleasant that, for me, it crossed a line and left behind a rather sour taste. That major hang up on my part aside, I can’t recommend Roulette enough. Again, it’s a challenging film that’s certainly not easy to watch, but is, at the end of the day, a compelling and rewarding one, and is very much worth taking a chance on.
