Kill Me Three Times (2015)

Kill Me Three Times arrives from Western Australia by way of the 2014 festival circuit, a black comedy thriller assembled from double-crosses, blackmail, and a stolen safe. A hit man named Charlie Wolfe drifts through a town called Eagles Nest while a dentist with a gambling debt, his scheming receptionist wife, and a corrupt cop each try to profit from the same corpse. The machinery turns. Nobody learns anything. This is the sort of film a serious critic classifies quickly and then returns to the shelf.

The cast is a standard Australian ensemble, with Alice Braga, Brazilian by birth, holding a lead role. Her presence is incidental, unremarked, and no representational argument is being made. Her character survives her own murder and walks away with the money, which is noir plotting, not a manifesto. Greed powers every scheme, but the film has no interest in diagnosing the system that produced it. Avarice here is a genre engine, nothing more. There is no LGBTQ subtext, no environmental conscience, no body-image discourse, no neurodivergent character, and no history in need of correction. The ledger stays empty.

That leaves the question of instruction, and here the film is a welcome blank. It never tells us how to feel. It lets a dentist murder his own wife for an insurance payout and trusts the audience to laugh. No speeches. No moral. Just Simon Pegg, bemused, impaled on a garden stake, politely answering his phone. Critics at the time found it derivative of Tarantino and the Coens, and they were not wrong. Still, a film this cheerfully amoral is its own kind of artifact, a relic of a less anxious mode of storytelling. We score it low and move on.