Trigger Warning: Kill Me features explorations of mental health and suicidal ideation, as well as depictions of attempted suicide that may be difficult for sensitive viewers. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal ideation (active or passive), help is available to you.
Depression lies. Amid all the things that are uncertain in the complexity of treating the human mind, the only thing we know for certain is that depression lies. Worse yet, it’s an internal manifestation, making it all the harder to ignore. From these lies a worldview is born, one which individuals feel they cannot overcome, one which manifests for the individual a perception that the problems of the world might cease if they weren’t within it. What does it take to snap one out of such a realization? What does it require for someone to see the difference between internal manipulation and external? Taking a dark-tinged comedic swing at such a question is writer/director Peter Warren’s feature directorial debut, Kill Me, having its world premiere in the Spotlight section of SXSW Film & TV Festival 2026. Spinning a mystery born out of trauma and using humor to medicate the pain, Kill Me is a hilarious, dark, and profoundly honest tale of someone just looking for someone to listen, really listen, and see who they are, not what their illnesses make them out to be.
Jimmy (Charlie Day) is having a rough day. Not only did he wake up in his bathtub filled with water and his own blood, no one believes him that he hadn’t tried to commit suicide, either. Not his sister, mother, stepfather, or therapist — not a one. Determined to prove his innocence, he sets out to investigate what happened the night it occurred because that’s where his memory is fuzziest, but he runs into roadblock after roadblock … that is, until the 911 dispatcher, Margot (Allison Williams), working the night he called in for aid gets involved, and then, suddenly, several clues start to appear and the events begin to pull into focus.
Kill Me walks (no pun intended) a razor’s edge. Opening (still no pun intended) with the inciting incident, there’s absolutely nothing funny about the sight of someone floating in a crimson water mixture or the physical performance by Day which conveys the seriousness of his situation. Yet, with the smallest of choices, the ridiculousness of humanity breaks through as the anxious conversation between Jimmy and Margot takes a pause with the noise of rushing water, the entire execution of the moment bringing with it a natural bit of humor to ease tension. We, the audience, need this in this moment as Conor Murphy’s (Oh, Hi!; Fantasy Life) cinematography begins by putting us in the tub (first), then in close proximity to the naked and pale Jimmy (second), before finally showing us Margot at work, her own pale and worn face lit solely by the light from her three-monitors (third). There’s nothing but bleak desperation up until this moment, a choice that signals Warren’s script isn’t all heartbreak, the levity offering the smallest hint that through the pain, laughter will arise. In truth, Kill Me isn’t a comedy in the sense of The Naked Gun (2025) (which mines comedy from the hardline lead living within a ridiculous world) or even The Running Man (2025) (whose humor is a tool to blunt the aggro parallels to the real world), but in the ways that life is often ridiculous even in traumatic moments. This will carry through the film from start to finish, offering natural counter-balances to the script’s mystery and the question that isn’t so much about whether Jimmy did try to kill himself or not, but whether he can trust his own perception of reality.
Charlie Day as Jimmy in KILL ME. Photo Credit: XYZ Films. Photo courtesy of SXSW.
In this way, Kill Me is more akin to Memento (2000) in that we’re told straight from the start that our protagonist is an unreliable narrator, but with the key difference of the structure Christopher Nolan applies in his neo-noir matches his lead’s medical condition of anterograde amnesia (short-term memory loss; no new memories), so we, the audience, go on a journey to solve the mystery we’re dumped into with the lead as it winds around him. Here, Warren has the audience follow two people, Jimmy and Margot, as he intertwines their stories while primarily only giving us what they know in the moments from their intersection on. This means that the audience has to choose whether or not to believe Jimmy. Day is a commendable actor, able to bring the comedy in straight roles (Honey Don’t; The Super Mario Bros. Movie) and in elevated ones (Pacific Rim; It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), and this role requires him to balance it all — heart, sorrow, wit, and horror — while remaining someone the audience can possibly believe in. His vocal and physical delivery manages to simultaneously create an aura around Jimmy of someone for whom we believe is positively full of shit and delusion *yet* instills doubt to the point of curiosity. Thus, Warren gives us Margot, someone outside of Jimmy’s family who can, in theory, be an impartial sounding board. Therefore, whenever Jimmy starts to sound crazy, there’s Margot to give it the sniff test. As conjecture starts flying everywhere, Jimmy desperate to prove that someone did this to him, having someone outside of Jimmy’s circle is imperative for the audience. Margot comes to represent someone we can trust to determine whether the latest “clue” or “theory” holds merit, a task which Williams (Get Out; M3GAN series) is more than up to. While Warren provides a very reasonable motive for Margot to want to connect with Jimmy despite it being against regulations at her work and the script continually finds natural reasons to keep Margot invested, it’s Williams who elevates Margot into someone the audience can fully trust as an unwavering perspective. Like Day’s ability to convey a convincing and compelling manic performance of someone desperate to be believed, Williams meets the energy with a compartmentalized coolness and heavy skepticism. Even as we wonder if Margot’s come down with folie à deux, Williams, through a simple kinesthetic approach, conveys it’s less shared delusion Margot’s investing in and more reasonable certainty. Despite the initial presentation of Margot as someone possibly equally as broken as Jimmy but from a different perspective, Williams gives the character such a sense of grounding that, just as Day’s Jimmy looks to Margot for approval and confidence, so do we. But, as Warren keeps trying to tell us throughout the film, all that who wander aren’t lost and all who look don’t necessarily see.
Speaking of the cast, it’s worth noting that this film has a small one and each member absolutely brings it. Aya Cash (The Floaters; The Boys) as Jimmy’s sister, Alice, might seem like a class-A pain as Alice berates Jimmy for his choices, yet Cash imbues every barb, every cutting glance, with heartbreak and disappoint so that we feel for Alice while wanting to comfort Jimmy. Giancarlo Esposito (Captain American: Brave New World; Community) offers a particularly remarkable and delicate performance as Jimmy therapist, Dr. Singer. Like all things within Warren’s tale, every person has something else going on (Alice’s anger and love, for instance), which makes Esposito’s presentation of Dr. Singer important as a healthcare professional who’s been working with Jimmy for a long time, but the words Singer uses and the delivery by Esposito can have duplicitous meaning … or do they merely because Jimmy is on the hunt to solve a mystery and we, the audience, are suddenly conditioned to see a plot everywhere? The genius in the casting, however, fully lands with Jessica Harper as Jimmy’s mother, Randi. A working actor since 1971, most in the horror/thriller community who mention her name connect it with Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), in which a dancer from America finds herself questioning her own sanity as she studies ballet in Germany. Harper’s mere presence within Kill Me sends a message to audiences that what we observe may not be real, but it also may not be a hallucination either, further cracking the barrier between truth and deception that already courses through the script.
There’s a short-list of people the world would likely be a better place without and they’re all in the Epstein Files. That’s irrefutable. But you, dear reader, you who may be told by your own mind that today’s struggles would be eased by welcoming the big sleep? Not as much. This is the one concrete thing within Warren’s Kill Me that is not controversial or punctuated with a joke. It’s not that life is or isn’t precious, but that the person is and that, generally speaking, each of us contains the capacity to improve and thrive. At no point in Kill Me are we meant to believe that Jimmy is better off without support systems (medical or otherwise) nor does it make light of the acts that Jimmy may or may not have committed; rather, Warren does what anyone in therapy does: embrace the gallows humor so as not to be overtaken by the gallows themselves. As stated, Warren walks a razor’s edge with Kill Me and this film is going to delight some and frustrate others all to hell and the discussions that it creates in the aftermath should be glorious. Please be so kind as to stick around to participate in it.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal ideation (active or passive), help is available to you.
Screening during SXSW Film & TV Festival 2026.
For more information, head to the official SXSW Film & TV Festival Kill Me webpage.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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