Dead in a Week: Or Your Money Back *** (2018, Tom Wilkinson, Aneurin Barnard, Christopher Eccleston, Marion Bailey) – Movie Review

Writer-director Tom Edmunds’s Dead in a Week: Or Your Money Back is a well acted, constantly amusing, often funny British black comedy thriller, with plenty of quirky ideas and just the right tone and attitudes. It is dark and cynical, but playful and upbeat.

Aneurin Barnard stars as William, a depressed and despondent young would-be author, who is approached by a shadowy figure on a bridge while attempting his tenth unsuccessful suicide. The man (Tom Wilkinson) offers the lad his card – Leslie, Assassin – and offers his services too: Dead in a Week: Or Your Money Back.

Main stars Tom Wilkinson, Aneurin Barnard and Marion Bailey are most entertaining, and Christopher Eccleston scores a hit as the evil boss of the Guild of Assassins, who wants to pension Wilkinson off as his kill rate is declining. Bailey plays Leslie’s loving suburban, lower middle-class wife Penny, who is mostly interested in winning a local needle-work competition with her embroidered cushion, but is entirely supportive of Leslie’s assassin career.

You just know that the couple’s cute, beloved budgies are not going to survive the movie. But then it seems that maybe a lot of the humans won’t either. Inevitably, or there wouldn’t be a story, William has a change of mind or a change of heart when he meets a girl, Ellie (Freya Mavor), and just as inevitably Lelsie keeps coming for him. So Leslie’s chances of survival seem as slim as those of the budgies.

It premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 27 June 2018 and is released in the UK on 16 November 2018.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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