‘Kill them first, then bury them. That makes so much more sense now — Jay Baruchel and Rosa Byrne in Just Buried

Just Buried

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Unrestricted by ratings or marketing campaigns designed to ensure family friendliness, films branded as dark comedies often share a cliché masquerading as a central conceit: “Death is a funny thing.” Just Buried, written and directed by Chaz Thorne, tells the story of Oliver Whynacht (Jay Baruchel), a bumbling nerd in “hilarious” outdated glasses who inherits a nearly bankrupt funeral home from his estranged father. There he meets Roberta Knickel (Rosa Byrne), a mortician who, in a desperate attempt by Thorne to develop a character deeper than a tea saucer, likes to have sex on top of dead people. Together, they accidentally kill two people in contrived, uninspired ways and then proceed to murder many more in contrived, uninspired ways in order to boost the traffic of their ailing funeral home. Then the film ends on a twist that is — no surprise — contrived and uninspired. Laughing yet?

Just Buried comes across like a film made by someone who adored Fargo and Six Feet Under (homages to both abound), but couldn't grasp what made either great. Thorne has neither the Coen Brothers' gift for witty, naturalistic dialogue, nor the confidence and ability to emulate Alan Ball and company's complex, character-driven plot movement. What substitutes for these are a series of increasingly implausible coincidences and facile circumstances. One scene has Oliver and Roberta standing in a shower with a recently dead man who's dripping blood and threatening to alert the police officer on the other side of the curtain. Had they just left the body where it was, the scene would have been a much more plausible accident than the one they later engineer, but that would preclude the “zany” shower sequence. With situational humour, it's tough to laugh when suspension of disbelief has been strained, broken and ground to talcum dust under the writer's ham-fist.

The beat-to-beat failure of the writing leads to plot holes glaring as gaping wounds, and the dreariness of the camerawork only compounds the film's textual problems. Thorne's Telefilm-supported budget is no excuse for the monotonous cavalcade of shots he subjects the audience to. Though his directing style is mercifully workmanlike and easily ignored, it does draw further attention to the formulaic script. It's stiffer than... you get the idea.