Main Remains: The Path to the Afterlife Twists Through Former Best Friends

Abigail Bruley’s Main Remains sends its dead protagonist on a 39-hour deadline to make peace with her mortal life over a 10-minute runtime in a dark comedy plot outfitted with resentments, revenge, and adolescent hopes and dreams. The final instalment of her Main trilogy begins with the messy combination of hang-ups, tight deadlines, and the threat of eternal purgatory. The dominant question is, Is Main capable of peace?

Main Bellvue (Bruley) is dead after being struck by lightning. Neither her brain nor her heart have caught up with the reality of her bodily death. It’s the sort of thing that you don’t need death—only an intellectual disorder—to be able to identify with right away. As a result, as soon as her niche audience meets Main, she is endeared despite her general unlikeability.

She has been granted 39 hours—one for each year she was alive—to put her earthly affairs in order. Failure, her escort to the afterlife (Ellen Boscov) tells her, will mean being stuck in limbo forever. Misuse of the powers (like telekinesis) given to her for the sole purpose of moving on will lead, again, to being trapped in the in-between forever.

This ostensibly hot mess of a woman-child thus has only one option: follow instructions. A deeply unpleasant task thus staring her in the face, Main, understandably, takes all the wiggle room she can get on misbehaving. Notebooks jump out of shelves, cordial mothers spit out mean tirades, and families get sent on adventures to secure elaborate funerals. Also caught in the middle of this—in a mirror of Main’s limbo—is her former best friend and narrative foil, Liz (Marisa Dabice of Mannequin Pussy).

As a final act of friendship, it has fallen on Liz to honour Main’s adolescent funeral plan. It leads her to the shadowy offices of Enchanted Exits and the services of unnamed, honey-sweet, vine-creepy funeral director played by Emily Mcgraw. It is the funniest scene of the film, a rosy union of writing, lens choice, lighting, extreme closeups, and Mcgraw’s delightfully unpredictable, scene stealing performance. Though the scene runs for less than two minutes, Mcgraw and Dabice work wonders with their respective characters and their chemistry. It is also here that Liz’s personality shines through and gives credence and history to her friendship with someone like Main.

The climax feels almost removed from the rest of the narrative and intentionally so—it means that the frictions have been laid to rest. In their place, the friendship at the core of the story blossoms one final time (accompanied by the groovy score by Sun Ra Arkestra) with the profundity of childhood love and loyalty.

Main Remains is by turns theatrical, morbid, moving, solemn, and almost always, very funny. This is the end for Main Bellvue. But if death can be put on pause, dead characters can be brought out of retirement. At least once or twice. Who knows.

Watch Main Remains Short Film Trailer