Echobend Pictures
I don’t entirely recall when I first came across the YouTube videos of ‘Chris & Jack’, frequently surrealist comedy short pieces starring friends Chris W. Smith and Jack De Sena (who was famously the voice of Sokka in the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender). But although I don’t usually laugh in an unhinged way watching their stuff, it’s often very clever and definitely always worth a watch if you like that sort of stuff. Reminds me of old school YouTube in a way, sort of like the ancient ‘Smosh’ channel — those guys had a terrible movie they felt pressured to make, but it was a very different online landscape back then, and had millions of subscribers. In comparison, Chris & Jack (having over 700K) feel almost quaint. And with more to prove.
Me, Myself, and the Void comes from the same team, directed by Tim Hautekiet (their frequent collaborator) and written along with Nik Oldershaw (mainly known as a comedy podcaster) and starring Jack and Chris as Jack and Chris, but as fictionalized versions of themselves. It’s the sort of a meta-nonsense that would be grating if it felt self-aggrandizing, but this is anything but that.
We start by watching Jack on stage giving a stand-up routine before his friend Chris mysteriously somehow joins him on stage from nowhere, weirding Jack out — and then realizes that the audience is now gone too. The two begin walking in an odd void, filled with different pieces of Jack’s life, as they try to figure out what’s going on — but then they open the door to a bathroom where Jack is lying motionless on the floor.
Naturally they assume this is some sort of post-death nonsense that’s all in Jack’s head, unless of course he isn’t dead which means he needs to figure out how to wake up. So the first question is a mystery — how did it happen? Jack can’t remember, so he begins to live through his past memories as they play out as scenes again, with Chris along for the ride to make arch asides.
Slowly we uncover the more complicated, less silly world that Jack is remembering about himself — his struggles with stand-up, lack of income, annoyance with parents, his issues with Chris’ possibly abusive girlfriend, and his terrible breakup with ex-girlfriend Mia (Kelly Marie Tran) — in a situation where it’s never clear who the real villain is, if there even was one at all.
It gets heavier and heavier as we approach the climax, as Jack wrestles with his unfinished business and begins to remember the problems he’s been poorly handling. This is when we get some real juicy stuff from Jack De Sena and Kelly Marie Tran as they shed any further pretense of a lighthearted romp and really get into the gritty garbage of life.
So yeah, this isn’t a delightfully surrealist comedy of silliness, but more a dark comedy that dips more into drama the more it progresses, but it also knows how to leverage clever editing tricks and a low budget to elevate the sort of YouTube world this team came from. I definitely enjoyed both how it started (with zany darkness) and how it ended (with considerate and thoughtful emotional themes) — and it’s always good with an indie movie that you can never quite be sure if there will be a happy ending or not. Which means you can always be surprised.
Me Myself and the Void has a run time of 1 hour 25 minutes, and is unrated.
Echobend Pictures
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