‘Kill Me’ Review: Charlie Day Cracks a Case That Could Break Him in Disarming Black Comedy

A depressed man's search for a murderer keeps leading back to questioning himself in Peter Warren’s ambitious and often affecting debut feature.

There’s a shamelessly bad crime procedural that Jimmy (Charlie Day) has on in the background as he awakens in a hospital from a near-death experience in “Kill Me.” Its appearance is brief, but significant as he starts to make sense of what happened to him after waking up in a bathtub full of his own blood. Although much of the evidence suggests he did this to himself, writer-director Peter Warren craftily reimagines the whodunit, when the suspect Jimmy knows the least about is himself when battling severe depression. An investigation will give him a reason to live as he’s forced to consider why he’d want to die.

There’s a strong sense of irony throughout the darkly comic potboiler which sees Jimmy tell himself he isn’t responsible for the slash on his right wrist. But his sister Alice, (Aya Cash) who had to care for him in the aftermath of a past attempt, isn’t convinced, although Jimmy hasn’t felt the need to share how he’s feeling with anyone in his immediate circle, including his mother (Jessica Harper) and stepfather. While Jimmy regularly goes to therapy with a compassionate doctor (Gianfranco Esposito), he doesn’t get much from it, espcially since he’s recently gone off his medication. It’s easy to assume Jimmy is a crackpot — after all, he’s long been immortalized in meme form as a conspiracy theorist with a pinboard from his role on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” — but the role allows for Day to show his range and he runs with it.

The same can be said for his co-star Alison Williams when “Kill Me” also flirts with being a romcom, to intriguing ends. It makes for a most unconventional meet-cute when her 911 dispatch operator Margot is the one to answer Jimmy’s call the night of the incident, keeping him on the line until paramedics show up. Neither should be able to reach other again, but when she’s the only one he knows who has direct memory of what happened that night, he narrows down the operators by a process of elimination. Although she doesn’t want to be drawn in, she went into her chosen field to be of service.

There are times when the film can feel weighted down by its clever framework. Externalizing the steps of deeply internal emotional progress Jimmy and Margot make with one another’s help can occasionally seem like a separate pursuit from satisfying genre expectations when it really does appear there’s a killer on the loose. However, the approach proves fresh more often than not. When an investigation may disappoint Jimmy in terms of clues regarding the night in question, it lays bare how closing himself off to others has had damaging effects well beyond himself that he’s only now becoming conscious of, poisoning relationships with his family and destroying his last serious relationship. He learns of this from crashing a surprise party his ex (Sam Rothermel) is throwing for her new beau in one of the film’s funniest scenes.

In a lesser film, it could be in poor taste when Warren invokes the memory of the late, great Elliott Smith by deploying a cover of the singer-songwriter’s “Needle in the Hay” at a key moment where things start to come together for Jimmy, but when the punk rockers Churlington revitalize it, it’s a poignant suggestion that there’s a chance for reinvention before it’s too late and in “Kill Me,” the deep cuts are never what you expect.