“The only thing it looks like you’re giving is up,” muses one character in Helen’s Dead, director K. Asher Levin’s offbeat new film, which sets up the comedic fodder that follows. The film about a dinner party gone wrong has plenty of spunk. Addie (Dylan Gelula of XX) discovers that her boyfriend is sleeping with her cousin Helen and makes a bold move to confront them at a dinner party. She’s not the only one crashing the party. Helen is found dead, and everybody is a suspect.
If you appreciate the clever twists found in streaming series like The Afterparty or the Knives Out films, you’ll appreciate what writer Amy Brown Carver serves up here. The film features an all-star cast, including Emile Hirsch (Into The Wild, Dig), Annabelle Dexter-Jones (Succession), Tyrese Gibson (Fast X), and Oliver Cooper (Classified). Director K. Asher Levin shared more about the film in this exclusive MovieWeb interview.
A ‘One Crazy Night’ Movie
K. Asher Levin has been a successful producer and director for some time, having been behind the scenes in films like Dig, Slayers, and television series Total Eclipse and Chicken Girls. After taking a break from filmmaking to launch a digital media company, he’s returned to the screen with Helen’s Dead, which reunites him with Emile Hirsch, with whom he worked with on Dig. Hirsch coincidentally is set to turn heads in the upcoming film Walden.
“Emile had said to me, ‘I love comedy so much, and I never get cast in real comedy roles,’” Levin shared, noting that he told Hirsch he’d just received a script. “He read it, and he’s like, ‘Oh, this is fun, I got ideas.’ He gave me some ideas, and I was like, ‘Okay, great, we’re going to make a funny movie here.”
The film wins points for its offbeat premise, and Levin wanted to turn up the volume of some of the more absurd moments that he found in Amy Brown Carver’s original screenplay, noting that he was telling potential studios that the film had a Knives Out and After Hours vibe.
“I’m a fan of After Hours by Martin Scorsese,” he added. “From the get-go of reading Amy’s draft, I definitely pushed it further. The script isn’t like After Hours, but the characters and the vibe felt a lot like it, given the fact that [the characters] are sort of, you know, yuppie adjacent — the millennials’ version of the ’80s characters that were in that film.
“I love one-crazy-night movies,” he went on, “and I wanted this to feel freewheeling while filming and lean into the sort of [John] Cassavetes and [Robert] Altman stuff as well as some of the mid-’90s filmmakers I loved so much when I was a teenager.”
Bring on the Gore
Inevitably, Addie’s party crashing takes a backseat to seat to the murder at hand in Helen’s Dead. Suddenly, everybody’s a suspect. Levin praised the cast, noting Tyrese Gibson’s standout performance. Mostly, he was jazzed to bring something unique to the typical murder mystery genre.
“It’s definitely not a run-of-the-mill film, and it’s really not classifiable,” he said. “It leans much more into a true independent filmmaking sensibility. It’s a small film with actors of note. I was lucky enough to have, top to bottom, every single actor in this movie being very experienced.” He added:
“I think people will be surprised by how gory the film is. I do a lot of horror stuff, so blood for me is like, ‘how much more can we do and how gross can we get things?’ There was not a lot ‘off-screen’ on this movie. When you think about these kinds of films […] there tends to be a lot of ‘off-screen’ [moments] with those sorts of things. I definitely lean towards gore.”
He also noted how it adds to the sense of danger. Another unique aspect of the shoot was that there were some improv elements tossed in throughout the shoot. “It’s not like an Adam McKay movie or anything like that,” Levin pointed out. “I definitely directed it much more in the vein of, ‘Whoever’s got a funny line throw it out and let’s try a couple different versions and see what works.’ For some of the scenes, it was more obvious where there’s riffing.”
What I’ll do is just workshop with actors in advance, so it’s not exactly improv, but it’s probably closer to what would be on SNL or something like that, where we work on it a week before, and people say, ‘Hey, I got an idea for this thing. Let’s add it to the script.’
He said writers are always on set, and Amy Brown Carver took in the potential tweaks. “I really wanted the film to feel real and lived in, in the way a Cassavetes film is, and give room for experimentation from performance.”
You can see how real it is when Helen’s Dead hits theaters and becomes available on demand November 3 from Screen Media. You can check out a clip from the film below:
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
