From Omeleto.
A man gets a visitor.
LAUGH WITH ME is used with permission from Karen McPherson. Learn more at https://elevatorproductions.com.au.
Newly divorced, Matt is going through a crisis and retreated from the world, living in a remote rural forest in complete solitude. His only real company is a kookaburra bird, whose echoing laugh is anything but comforting.
But then Matt is visited by his brother, James, who is one of the sources of Matt’s agony. James tries to break through to Matt, but he only stirs up Matt’s deepest emotions, forcing both into an outright confrontation.
Directed and written by Karen Liebau McPherson, this restrained yet vividly emotional short drama explores the unbearable tight knot of tension, grief, and sorrow, and the ways it makes us retreat, distort, and isolate ourselves and our stories. Driven by griefs both recent and farther in the past, Matt wants to withdraw. He has seemed to achieve that, living now in a remote rural setting. But the world, in all its noisy persistence, refuses to let him, as does his brother, who seeks to bring him back to the world despite his recent betrayal of Matt.
Opening with close-ups of nature and an axe smashing into wood, the film introduces Matt at the height of his isolation, living in a ramshackle shack surrounded by a forest. But Matt is anything but peaceful; he even chops wood with a force that feels dangerous and even emotionally violent in moments. Capturing the setting with moody, cloistered cinematography, the film deftly constructs nature as a character, particularly through the mocking cackle of the kookaburra, which seems to comment on Matt’s emotions. The bird’s call galls Matt even further. But that’s nothing next to the explosive torrent of feeling that emerges when James arrives. James is the last person that Matt wants to see, but James refuses to let Matt disappear from his life.
The storytelling builds up to their confrontation, and the pared-down writing gives us just enough to understand just what happened, a betrayal that has left Matt bereft and James guilty. As Matt and James, respectively, actors Justin Hosking and Linc Hasler generate an unpredictable dynamic, each working through layers of difficult emotions: anger, grief, anguish, and the bereftness that comes from the loss of trust. Their confrontation is raw, volatile and unpredictable. But the emotional bloodletting allows them to drill down to a common loss, one that helps them remember their shared history and the love that makes it ache and break all the more painfully.
Sensitive, beautifully crafted and emotionally raw, LAUGH WITH ME keenly notes how siblings of a family "come from the same wound," observing how that wound is expressed differently in each member and creates more damage. Matt and James share a familial history, and they’re just beginning to see how it’s shaped their decisions. But it finds hope in acknowledging the messy, imperfect space between hurt and forgiveness, silence and laughter. It understands that grief rarely ends, but life, in all its disruptive, insistent forms, always finds a way back in.
