Till Death: A Faustian Deal and a Lavish Hell in Comedy of a Family Hoping for the Good Life

Yana Billé-Chung’s Till Death is a morbid comedy fit for our times: a couple buys a house and then lives as its tenants under the omnipresent gaze of its former owner/landlady. But the real joke (that only hurts if you don’t laugh) is their garage-sized studio “apartment” into which they first fit themselves, then a toddler, then a dog, and then yet another infant. All within a space where a pea could bounce off their dining table and land at the head of their bed.

The brisk 20-minute runtime covers a span of three years. River (Nancy Ma) and Alex (Kieran Roberts) buy into a promise: pay 40% of the selling price for a mouth-watering house they could never otherwise afford, wait for the current owner to pass away in a matter of months, and live with her until that fated day. “Live with” is evidently quite load bearing after that description of their actual quarters—Mrs Campbell (Rosie Lee Hooks) effectively lives by herself in the big house while River and Alex pointe their way through their ghetto. But the couple is happy. By the end of the year that house will be theirs. #adoptanelder does its rounds within River’s small following on social media.

Three years later, the smiles have soured. River embodies the entire frustration of Mrs Campbell’s betrayal by not keeping the promise of dying. The film obviously relies on the novelty, risk, and ludicrousness of that premise, and it pays off. River finds herself in the difficult, if not quite as uncharted as anyone would like to publicly declare, territory of eagerly waiting for her new and follower-beloved…neighbour to kick the bucket. Tensions arise and are swept under the carpet, a one-sided decorum maintained with the same caution as a hopeful heir toeing the line with their rich relative.

The writing makes nifty use of social media not only as a plot point but also to characterise River. She increasingly straddles the difference between understandably calculating and diabolical enough to make the viewer nervous to still be able to identify with her. And while there are plenty of the usual morals to be gleaned from the story—living with humility, desiring with modesty, and so on—we are also living in the same but worse socioeconomic conditions that sparked 2019’s Parasite. As a result, River’s hopes (and actions) end up within the scope of viewer sympathy. Dangled in front of her was the promise of everything, even a pool. So what if she had to giddily look forward to an old woman’s death? At least that was the bargain she signed up for.

For her part, Mrs Campbell transitions smoothly from sweet and ailing to cartoonishly evil, a collage of resentful mother-in-law, nosy neighbour, resident devil. The shift itself is so abrupt it is its own joke and her former career as an actress plays it up all the more. But hating her is complicated, because the film still invests in her humanity. Her inconvenient refusal to keep up her end of the bargain—again, the promise to die on time—and other nefarious possibilities aside, she is also just a person in their twilight years trying to live well. And poor, innocent Alex, caught in the middle, can only powerlessly bring up ethics and strive for decency in the face of a frustration he does not really want to look too closely at.

Till Death takes the little ambitions of contemporary life and builds a funny, sharply felt comedy around it whose crescendo leans heavily into its more morbid tendencies. River and Mrs Campbell make for a complicated Faust and Mephistopheles, locked in a cold war that politeness will not allow them to acknowledge. River, damned to a corner of her opulent hell, may just be forced to smile and wave for eternity.

Come for the laughs, stay for the meditation on our piss poor prospects.

Watch Till Death Short Film Trailer