I Hate Myself and Want To Die star Mike Castle delivers a powerhouse performance as a man whose attempts to die are comically interrupted.
There are a lot of people who really dig the vibe of the film I Hate Myself and Want To Die.
Let me set the scene. It will help determine whether or not you’re one of those people.
Jacob (Mike Castle, a dead ringer for Office-era John Krasinski) writes an email to a close friend saying goodbye. He intends to kill himself. First, though, he wants to make sure that his friend knows he can have one of his most prized possessions: a rare Jason Voorhees mask. Jacob aligns a tube with his exhaust pipe, running into the back seat of his mom’s Subaru. We know he’s really serious because he covers all of his bases by taping a piece of cardboard to block the remaining exposed area of the window. He settles into the driver’s seat, selects a curated song by which to die, and lays back, eyes closed.
He then becomes annoyed by the persistent cries of a crow in a nearby tree. Unsettled, he decides to get out of the car and throw a rock at the crow. Then, the piece of cardboard has fallen away from the window. He must re-tape that but cuts his finger in the process. Retrieving a first aid kit from the glovebox, Jacob bandages his bleeding finger. This, of course, highlights the underlying theme of the scene: does he really want to die at all?
After finally inhaling exhaust for an extended period of time, Jacob realizes something isn’t right. Getting out of the car, he Googles information about carbon monoxide poisoning. Turns out that catalytic converters effectively make asphyxiation by car exhaust essentially a thing of the past. (Note: I have no idea if this is true, so please don’t try this at home.) Jacob then finds out burning coal from a small hibachi grill established in a car will do the trick. That sets into motion a chain of events that essentially stalls his suicide strategy for several hours.
I Hate Myself and Want To Die isn’t for all tastes, clearly. There is an art form to delivering a truly dark comedy. Writer / director J. Davis has to balance a very thin line between establishing moments of sardonic humor with genuine emotional depth. This is, after all, a man who has given up on life despite still holding the affections of several close friends and family members. Davis deserves credit for even attempting such a balance and for getting much of it right. A spiritual descendant of Better Off Dead, the film also has the breezy “anything goes” vibe of 90s-era teen comedies like Go.
Davis was wise to select Mike Castle as Jacob. The audience needs to care about Jacob immediately, and there’s little dialogue at the film’s start to really endear him to us. Fortunately, Castle is an incredibly amiable and charismatic actor, fitting the sad-sack role of Jacob perfectly. He’s particularly good at masking his deep well of depression through mindless chatter with his mother (Meredith Salenger). His stand-out moment, however, is a mid-film sequence in which someone dresses him down for being 30 and living at home. Castle momentarily relinquishes that deceptively sunny exterior and exposes us to the true pain at his center. That moment, among others, recalled Alan Ruck’s great performance as Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The film belongs to Castle, and he gives an outstanding performance.
If I’m slightly hesitant on the overall project, then it’s because I Hate Myself and Want To Die puts so many obnoxious barriers in his way throughout this single night. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want him to die, but the running gag is that the very things driving him to hopeless are the very things keeping him alive. It establishes a series of events that, entirely depending on your tolerance levels, make or break the film for you. Still, there aren’t many films that fully explore the depths to which people go to end their lives. Even when discussed through a dark comedy filter, it’s still a conversation worth having.
