There’s a deadpan finality in the titular utterance of Iair Said’s first fiction feature, a contrived despondency passing off as statistical fact. In Most People Die on Sundays, death remains an uneasy conversational topic, fraught with gravitas and gallows humor, whereas the communities that persist, day-to-day in its face, do their best to hold their own. For David (Said), a 30-something gay Jewish man returning to his hometown of Buenos Aires fat, sad, and woefully single, such uneasiness provides some measure of solace to unpack — if not subsist in — the understated but overwhelming existential turmoils that tend to afflict the well-traveled. Said neither confirms nor denies David’s cosmopolitan roots, but it is equally apparent that our protagonist’s proclivities aren’t exactly inclined toward the local custom.
Why this is so isn’t explicated so much as it is intuited. Opening with David abroad in shambles, overcome by paroxysms of grief and denial over an unseen breakup, Most People Die on Sundays respectably accentuates the not-unlikable eccentricities of its lead, gradually sprinkling in tidbits of psychological insight as he flies back — in fear, it must be added, given an unplanned lack of sleeping pills — for his uncle’s funeral. A bag of nerves and latent anxieties, David struggles to contain his unfocused lust while simultaneously reconnecting with family. He (unsuccessfully) hits on neighbors, family friends, and his driving instructor; resumes cordial if somewhat strained catch-up with the women in his life, including mother Dora (Rita Cortese), aunt Silvia (Antonia Zegers), and sister Elisa (Juliana Gattas); and wrestles, above all, with the hard-hitting possibility of being unlovable. His estranged father, now in a coma, is the film’s central source of tension over the difficult decision to pull the plug and bid farewell to the possibility, in David’s eyes, of enduring devotion.
Taken in tandem with a documentary feature, 2018’s Flora’s Life is No Picnic, under his belt, it’s clear that Said makes no secret his interest in capturing the minutiae of lived reality through a prism of tragicomedy, joining the ranks of national compatriots Martín Rejtman and Martín Shanly in tethering lightly fictionalized autobiography to various intricately woven threads around class, sexual, and diasporic identities. Yet Most People Die on Sundays remains, despite a certain degree of assuredness, too thin and one-note to really offer an engrossing character study. Where Shanly’s About Thirty (2023), for instance, decidedly articulated the absurdity and disillusionment of turning 30 through a sharp deployment of irony, Said’s film occupies uneven terrain, caught somewhere between its anti-comedic impulses and its gently sympathetic levity. Morbid laughter, to be sure, comes from a muted place; in this case, a stronger punchline might’ve made it stick longer.
DIRECTOR: Iair Said; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Big World Pictures; IN THEATERS: May 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 13 min.
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