Xavier Seron's Death By Death is a bizarre, yet captivating, comical study of depression and insecurities, focusing on the exploits of a dispirited man who constantly wrestles with his own mortality. Stuck between a needy mother, and a girlfriend who wants to move in together, the young man suffers through an existential crisis, haunted by his mother's bout with breast cancer, among other paranoid fixations on mortality. Xavier Seron's Death By Death is a singular vision of the existential crises, a film that follows a man whose insecurities have led him down a constant path of paranoia and ambivalence towards nearly everything around him. The most striking aspect of Seron's vision is simply how tonally comedic the whole experience is, with Death By Death featuring a pitch black comedy that doesn't hold back in presenting the borderline nihilism of its character. The film doesn't look down on the character, quite the opposite, but at the same time Death By Death proudly finds the comedy in his situation, being a film that is a fine example of the importance of comedy, even in times of depression. Death By Death embraces the inherent selfishness that exists in all individuals, contrasting this sad sack's ambivalence and paranoia towards everyone around him with his inner empathy for that of his mother and his girlfriend, who eventually breaks up with him towards the end of the film. It's only after these characters are out of the picture that this character becomes emotionally effected, with Death By Death capturing the importance of being happy/appreciating what one does have, doing so in its own unique, brutally honest way. Shot in black-and-white, Death By Death features a rather unique cinematic vision, oscillating between surrealistic moments and tight, close-up compositions, both of which wonderfully capture the underlying emotions of its main protagonist. Deceptively smart about depression, insecurity, and mortality, Xavier Seron's Death By Death is a bold, brutally honest portrait of death and life, being a film that I could only imagine is going to accrue a cult following eventually due to the brazen, quirky, cinematic universe it is able to create.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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