Deany Bean is Dead
“Deany Bean is Dead” is a dark comedy that puts the protagonist in a lot of awkward situations and makes light of them, but not without consequences.
The film opens up on Deanna, aka “Deany”, who wakes up in her car while listening to a podcast about murder. It turns out she has been stalking her ex-fiance and trying to stake him out. Deany works at a firm as an assistant and ultimately gets fired for screwing up a food order and almost killing her boss due to food allergies. Without going into too much detail, it’s suffice to say the situation Deany gets herself into is funny because she somehow ends up at her ex-fiance’s engagement get-together. This feature seems to be a satire on dating, stress-relief, and the complications of relationships as a whole and it works for the most part.
One thing I really liked about this feature is how every character has a flaw of some sort. Nobody is perfect in it and it really adds to the depth and complexity to each character. The flaws allow consequence to follow, and I’m super happy that Deany is never let off too easily for mistakes. Although there are some, “well how convenient” moments throughout the movie to move the plot along, a lot of it felt it was for humor rather than lazy filmmaking.
I really enjoyed the acting of all the characters. They seemed really experienced and brought a lot of craft to the table. For the most part, all of their characters were believable. What made them a little unbelievable is some of them felt a little underwhelming and perhaps a little underdeveloped. Sometimes their conflicts would conflict with one another too much and make a messy situation even more confusing, which is both good and bad. It happens to be good in the sense that when a situation arises at an event, as it did in this feature, there can be so much conflict at any given moment that nobody knows what is going on – and in a way that felt grounded and realistic in this. It happens to be bad because the decisions of the characters felt muddled without any reason and it really feels like it could have been fleshed out to be more cohesive.
There was a moment when I genuinely smiled to myself because of how classic it felt. It’s a scene where Deany and Myron, her ex-fiance’s brother, are outside singing. It reminded me of the 1960’s where two people would randomly sing a catchy tune. In this particular scene it also showed a new side of Deany and Myron both that felt refreshing. That being said, because of that scene, I wanted a lot more development between the two characters. The reason being because he comes back near the end and it’s one of those pivotal moments where I should be happy and believe there’s a reason to it, but ultimately I’m left empty-handed as to why there’s any connection between the two besides this one touching moment of singing.
Overall, I really enjoyed this piece of work. There were plenty of moments to chuckle and plenty of moments to relate too. It’s well crafted, well acted, and extremely clever.
