A Film with Me in It

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

2008 Irish Black Comedy/Thriller starring Dylan Moran (of Black Books fame) and Mark Doherty, who also wrote the script.

Mark (Doherty) is a going-nowhere actor and clarinet player who lives in a crumbling flat with his increasingly disgruntled and frustrated girlfriend Sally (Amy Huberman) and his wheelchair-bound and vegetative brother David (David O'Doherty), and spends most of his time hanging out with his best friend Pierce (Moran), a struggling screenwriter and director who is planning a project which is intended to kickstart their respective careers. His flat is slowly falling to bits because his landlord Jack (Keith Allen) refuses to do repairs until he gets the rent owed from the perpetually short-of-cash Mark. This is significant.

One day, a wobbling chandelier finally gives up the struggle against gravity, which sets off a chain reaction of accidents that result in an increasing number of dead bodies piling up in the flat before Mark's disbelieving eyes. Panicking, he summons Pierce for help, who hits upon the idea of treating it as if it were a pitch for a film to enable the two to figure out how to get out of the mess in which they've become embroiled.

Tropes used in A Film with Me in It include:
  • Actor Allusion: Dylan Moran plays a rather eccentric struggling alcoholic with pretensions of being a writer -- a role not a million miles from a certain bookshop owner he became famous for playing.
  • The Alcoholic: Pierce is very reluctantly admitting he's one of these.
  • Black Comedy
  • The Cast Showoff: In-story; Mark insists on making the hero of Pierce's script a clarinet player so that only he [Mark] can play the role.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Almost everything in the flat:
    • The wonky chandelier falls on David, crushing him to death.
    • A flickering lightbulb which electrocutes Jack, causing him to fall and be impaled by a screwdriver through the neck.
    • Mark's clarinet which he forgets to put back on its stand, meaning that Sally impales herself on said stand when she faints.
    • A loose, heavy window which crushes the neck of a policewoman who stumbles upon the scene in the flat and tries to escape through it.
  • The Danza: Mark and David.
  • Disaster Dominoes: The entire flat is just one of these waiting to happen.
  • Genre Savvy: Both Mark and Pierce attempt to apply to this to their situation. Unfortunately, they're not incredibly good at it.
  • Heroic BSOD: The stress of the day gets to both Mark and Pierce.
  • Make It Look Like an Accident: Inverted; all the deaths are completely accidental, but occur in circumstances and have results that would instantly look suspicious to any outside observer.
  • She Knows Too Much: After a policewoman stumbles upon the scene, Pierce decides she has to go. He ultimately can't bring himself to do it, but the Disaster Dominoes of the flat take care of her anyway.
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