Ally Pankiw’s I Used To Be Funny grapples with the aftermath of trauma, adding yet another layer to Rachel Sennott’s increasingly-diverse catalogue of roles.
Sennott’s Sam is a Toronto-based comedian who has had some relative success, but has stagnated. This is in no small part due to PTSD from an incident that we won’t find out details of until the back half of I Used To Be Funny. Told in a disjointed series of scenes that are primarily about Sam’s work as an au pair to a wealthy family – Father Cameron (Jason Jones) and his terminally-ill wife (Hannah Spear), and their young teen daughter Brooke (Olga Petsa) – we’re fed breadcrumbs of what has halted Sam’s life and career.
In the present, and soon after Jill’s death, Brooke suddenly disappears. Sam hasn’t spoken to her in some time, their relationship clearly damaged, but when Brooke shows up at Sam’s to break her window and vanish again, Sam takes it upon herself to find her former ward. Meanwhile, Sam must grapple with her own trauma and damaged career, leaning perhaps too hard on her extremely supportive roommates Philip (Caleb Hearon) and Paige (Sabrina Jalees), while also untangling the mystery of Brooke and, perhaps, repair their once-close bond. It’s this bond, and not the handling of trauma, that becomes the essential kernel of I Used To Be Funny, and the film is never stronger than when Sennott and Petsa share the screen. What could be an easier story and emotional hook by leaning on the trauma takes a more difficult tac by making it about the strongly-drawn characters first, and Pankiw’s film is better for it.
I Used To Be Funny is Pankiw’s first feature after a host of TV credits including ‘Schitt’s Creek’, ‘Black Mirror (Joan is Awful)’, and music videos for Beaches, Muna, Arkells, and Janelle Monae. Her confidence as a director comes through in her young actors’ performances, particularly Petsa whose Sam is a complicated and meaty role for someone so early in their career. With Sennott, who has developed a breadth of work in films like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Shiva Baby, and Bottoms and who takes on this more vulnerable and dramatic role with natural ease, perhaps because it allows her to build on her solid foundation of comedy, it feels authentic. Pankiw says in a recent interview that she “really tried to write it in a way that [talks] about heavier things with [friends and peers] and with other young women…It affects everything. To treat those instances [of] violence against women as these isolated things that just happened to one person, it’s so not real. I just wanted to speak to how me and my friends actually talk about that, and how we navigate that, and how we’ve developed a sense of gallows humor about it. What other choice do you have?”
What comes through the best throughout I Used To Be Funny is the depth of the writing, especially in the characters. They feel like whole people and especially Sam and Brooke are incredibly relatable. I Used To Be Funny is a confident and compelling feature debut for Pankiw, and yet another feather in the cap for Rachel Sennott.
I Used To Be Funny is currently in theatres from levelFILM
