UK | 2019 | Directed by Staten Cousins-Roe
Logline: A wallflower, quietly desperate for direction, finds extreme self-help from a committed life coach.
For his debut feature writer/director Staten Cousins Roe continues in the same darkly comic vein as his short This Way Out, but this time focusing on murderous intent, as opposed to assisted suicide. It’s a movie that satirises in the same dark fashion as Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, only less bloodily.
Lou (Katie Brayben) is living the drabbest of lives, having to care for her mother, whilst she spends whatever spare time she has wandering the equally drab coastal walks tuned into yet another self-help audiobook. She attends seminars as well, and it is here that she is “befriended” by Val (Poppy Roe), a life coach.
Val wasn’t expecting Lou to swing by her pad, or maybe she was, but either which way, Lou is onboard Val’s determined wee quest to do away with as many of those god awful self help groups as possible. It’s serial killing as culling, killing in the name of personal success, and Val seems to have a handle on it. Lou is feckless, but she’ll come around.
It soon becomes apparent that Val might not just be the realest of people, but the ride continues with Val in the driver’s seat and Lou accommodating the homicide, with only the slightest of concern. It it is also revealed early on that the itinerary is leading to the home of one Chuck Noah, the celebrity guru whom Lou idolises, and whom Val despises.
It is Chuck (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) who provides a kind of narration to the movie, as his seven steps to becoming a fitter, healthier, wealthier you pieces-to-camera are used as chapter stops. He is a deeply arrogant, but oh so charismatic man, it makes perfect sense he would have it all sorted out. Hypcocrisy? Pffft! There’s no such thing in the professional world of self-help gurus.
A Serial Killer’s Guide To Life is ruthless, but almost entirely bloodless, less concerned with showing the gory brutality of the killings, more interested in showing the underwhelmed reactions of its two protagonists. Or is that two antagonists? It’s a kind of Tyler Durden meets Jekyll and Hyde riff, and for the most part it works rather well, especially as the central performances are excellent. Brayben captures the awkwardness of her character with aplomb, while Roe (who is married to the director), is brilliantly deadpan as the mentor on a deadly mission, and Lloyd-Hughes’ smarmy delivery is pitch perfect.
For those who dig their comedies black-as-midnight-on-a-moonless-night, especially macabre and twisted fare such as Sightseers and Alice Rowe’s Prevenge, but less vicious, then this is the movie for you. Inspiring and funny in all the wrong, oh-so-right ways.