Dig Your Own Grave is a comedy short release 6 March 2019 at the Sarasota Film Festival, followed a week later at the Riverrun Film Festival. Greg Kindra produced it. Kirk Larsen directed and co-wrote it. And it stars Amos Vernon and Henry Zebrowski. Vernon co-wrote the script. It’s one of a surprising number of short films I see that are as professionally made as anything you will see in the multiplex. But that are also generally a lot more interesting. (Some day soon, I will write about why short films are more consistently good compared to features.)
“Dig Your Own Grave” Trop
The idea is very simple: digging a grave is hard work, but films make it out to be trivial. Screenwriters throw it into stories because it seems very badass. But would a murderer actually hang around for hours while their victim digs a grave? (Under the best of circumstances, professional grave diggers take between one and two hours!) In addition to the bordom, you might get caught.
In the film, the first sign that something is wrong is that the hitman brought a square shovel. That would be fine in some soils but not the rocky ground where this takes place. The joke for the first part of the film is that this is an unreasonable task. Even asking professionals to do it is unreasonable. There? You really want a backhoe.
Moving on, the film plays with different ideas of kindness. I’m with the hitman: making someone dig their own grave is much worse than murdering alone. I’d rather just be murdered than tortured and then murdered.
Watch It!
Dig Your Own Grave reminds me a lot of the work of Chris and Jack. They too deconstruct common film tropes like selling your soul to Satan and the ridiculous future dates in science fiction. (I was just watching Johnny Mnemonic, which hilariously takes place in 2021!)
I don’t mind movie tropes. In fact, they are necessary because there just isn’t time to do otherwise. But it is always welcome when talented people go after them in an insightful way. Check out Dig Your Own Grave!
Dig Your Own Grave (2019) poster via IMDb under Fair Use.