SXSW 'Daddio' Review: Casey Wilson’s comedy looks at different ways of grieving without trivializing death
Spoilers for 'Daddio'
In the introduction clip to her film 'Daddio', Casey Wilson reveals that her "comedy about death" is based on the truth about how her father and she coped with her mother's death.
Michael McKean (Better Call Saul) plays Paul, the father, while Casey Wilson (Gone Girl) herself plays Abby, the daughter. Paul and Abby have very different reactions to the sudden loss and find themselves recoiling at how each one is grieving. Then after an explosive confrontation in front of Abby's friends, they both realize that they are both in need of healing and they can turn to each other for support.
The 18-minute short is packed with witty dialogue, like the one between Abby and her friend commenting on her pee-stopping pills. "So when nature calls, you don't answer," to which Abby replies, "No one is home." Her reply is both funny and heartbreaking as she shows how she has checked out, unable to cope with her mother's death. Before the awkward dinner party at her house with her father and her two friends, we see her sleeping in the closet, sucking her thumb, and piling her clean laundry in a stolen supermarket cart because she is too listless to fold everything.
Paul, on the other hand, takes a diametrically different approach to grief when he finds himself alone after years of companionship. Not knowing "what to do", he fills up his time with whatever he can -- from going hot-tubbing with neighbors who are too polite to refuse a widower's request to getting a perm with the 20 dollars he finds on the street because he wants to look like Andrew Jackson.
As an avid documenter of life, he 'directs' Abby's eulogy while he is recording it, asking her to "take it from the top" when some of her words sound garbled because she is choked up with emotion. He also takes a selfie with his dead wife when he finds her dead when he wakes up next to her.
It is these photos that Abby reacts to with outrage and condemnation when they jump out of the stack of pictures Paul has brought to show Abby and her friends. Before this, we also see Paul silently judging Abby's depressing room wrapped in a layer of her grief with signs of her apathy scattered around the room.
When Abby angrily asks him why he would take pictures of her mother when she was dead, we see Paul, for the first time, lose his cheerful exuberance. "I didn't know what to do. I thought you wouldn't believe me if I told you she had died," he says disjointedly, becoming a hunched, grief-stricken husband in an instant while remembering the moment of loss and shock.
Abby realizes that Paul too is grieving -- in his own way -- and forgives him on the spot as her friends hurriedly put away the disturbing pictures. The film ends with Abby returning the shopping cart to the supermarket with her father and then dubbing the lines of her eulogy as Paul, exasperated, asks her for one "usable take".
The film's strength lies in how it handles a difficult subject matter with a light touch without trivializing the loss of a loved one. With a sitcom feel, the film seems like it is a scene from a TV show that you wouldn't mind bingeing on -- a lighter version of the Facebook Watch series 'Sorry for Your Loss', starring Elizabeth Olsen.
'Daddio' is part of Amazon Prime Video’s SXSW 2020 Film Festival Collection which is available to be streamed from April 27–May 6.