In short: Crush the Skull (2015)

After what was supposed to be their last job goes rather badly awry, highly accomplished burglar couple Blair (Katie Savoy) and Ollie (Chris Dinh, also the film’s co-writer) find themselves in debt to a rather nasty gangster. If they don’t want to lose any of their precious body parts, they have to find a new object to rob fast.

Fortunately, Blair’s brother Connor (Chris Riedell) is just in the very last stages of planning a lucrative heist (as he prefers to call it instead of the too pedestrian “burglary”) on a house somewhere out in the boons. There are a couple of problems with this, though. Firstly, Connor and Ollie hate each other with a passion, Ollie taking Connor to be a dangerously irresponsible amateur responsible for landing him in prison twice, and Connor thinking himself to be a criminal mastermind. Secondly, Ollie is absolutely right about Connor, and much of what they believe about the job will turn out to be badly wrong thanks to Connor not doing his research properly.

Which is to say, the trio and Connor’s partner Riley (Tim Chiou) break into the murder castle of a serial killer and soon find themselves locked in and on the menu as they guy’s next victims.

Indie horror comedies seldom work for me. Their scripts are all too often supposedly funny instead of actually funny, filled with jokes that are tedious instead of, you know, funny, and actors who lack in comical timing. So colour me happily surprised and impressed that Viet Nguyen’s Crush the Skull is a rather wonderful small (in the sense of a film that knows exactly on which scale it can best operate) movie.

Most – I’d say eighty-five percent, which is an insanely great quota for me and humour – jokes here actually hit their mark as they are written, and they are delivered with great comical timing by actors who clearly understand why what they are saying is supposed to be funny and how to emphasize it. But even when we leave the quality of the jokes aside, the script by Dinh and Nguyen is pretty great, understanding that a film needs more than just admittedly funny lines to actually work as a whole. Characterisation is probably the film’s greatest strength. For my taste, it is relatively unusual when a couple in a movie feels like any of the actual couples I know, but Ollie and Blair work wonderfully well. It’s not just that there’s chemistry in the writing and the acting between Savoy and Dinh, it’s that they show the right kind of closeness. The film avoids being demonstrative about the relationships between its characters and instead shows us how they act together and with each other in ways that feel organic and fun. And fun these characters are, fun enough, I’d watch them doing very little at all (or, you know, wish for some further adventures for them).


As it stands, the film’s whole serial killer plot is actually more of a set up to show how these characters interact than the film’s main concern. It is, however, imaginative and clever enough when it needs to be to hold the jokes and the characters together and give them something to work against. I did mention Crush the Skull is rather wonderful, didn’t I?