The Trouble with Jessica (Winn, 2023)
The Trouble with Jessica presents itself as a dark comedy, even though it is more sour than dark and never particularly funny.
Jessica (Indira Varma) is hardly in the movie. An uninvited guest who crashes Sarah’s (Shirley Henderson) and Tom’s (Alan Tudyk) dinner party, she pretends to be a rape victim to throw shade at her criminal defense attorney friend, Richard (Rufus Sewell) and then excuses herself, ostensibly to use the bathroom but actually to kill herself. The film’s conceit is supposed to be that Sarah and Tom are desperate to sell their house and presume that news of such a tragedy will deter buyers. So they try to convince their friends Richard and Beth (Olivia Williams) to keep the suicide under wraps until they can reach an agreement with a potential buyer.
The film vacillates between trying to be madcap and serious, but it never fully commits to either tone. Despite some exposition about the potential criminal charges for moving a dead body, I found it hard to believe that there were ever any real stakes beyond embarrassment for Sarah and Tom being found out. The dinner party barbs run in all directions, meaning nobody is really sympathetic, so I also wasn’t sure I cared if they went to prison much less lost the house.
When there are lulls in the hide-the-body plot, the two couples try to piece together the unknowable “why” of a person’s suicide and come to grips with what the pressure-filled situation reveals about their true selves to themselves and each other. In those moments, the film feels like it is trying to do the thing that only Jane Austen has been able to accomplish in the history of narrative without being annoying — wag its finger at you for being annoyed at an annoying character.
Tudyk, Henderson, Sewell, and Williams are each accomplished thespians, but it feels like all four characters are in different movies. Perhaps each is supposed to represent a different emotional response to trauma, but instead it feels like the actors are fighting to make continuity out a script that doesn’t have much consistency from scene to scene. For example, the discovery of Jessica’s body is played more or less straight — with shock, horror, and panic from four normal people. But those initial reactions, singling to the audience that there is a tie to realism, dissolves too swiftly. Perhaps if there had been more time to process what had happened…
One presumes from the title that the film finds some inspiration in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry. That film had a lot of charm because it foregrounded the comedy, allowing the dead body to be a McGuffin that could be explained away once the romantic plot points were resolved. Also, decent people thought they were culpable, but the script exonerates them, giving them (and the audience) a release from guilt that Jessica never does.
Also — and maybe this is nothing or everything — the comedic elements of dealing with a dead body are undercut when that body is a suicide. Jessica’s note notwithstanding, it’s hard to pivot from suicide to comedy without appearing to trivialize the former.
