Big Nothing

An unemployed teacher and a call centre worker find a way to make easy money: they will blackmail men who look for child pornography online, certain the victim will not go to the police. On the first attempt the man is found dead in his house, and from that moment the plan comes apart entirely. Every attempt to fix it adds another body. The subject is not crime but people who think themselves clever losing control fast. Charlie believes he is a writer, Gus believes he can solve anything, and both miss the simplest details. The comedy comes from that inadequacy. The form is black comedy and the plot keeps folding over on itself. It was shot in Wales but set in America; wooded landscape and rain make the substitution invisible. The casting is the interesting part. David Schwimmer and Simon Pegg were both known for television comedy at the time and the film takes each of them outside their usual register. It is one of Alice Eve's early films. Jean-Baptiste Andrea directs; he later left cinema for the novel and won a major French literary prize. Who it is for: viewers who like black comedy and stories of plans that keep getting worse. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the opening premise distasteful; the objection is fair and the film uses the matter only as a trigger.