Me, Myself & the Void
Written by Timothy Hautekiet and Nik Oldershaw
Directed by Timothy Hautekiet
Starring Jack de Sena, Chris W. Smith, and Kelly Marie Tran
Runtime 85 minutes
Now available to watch digitally

by Laurence Boag-Matthews, Staff Writer

Me, Myself & the Void is a genre bending new film directed by Tim Hautekiet, who I knew of in a past life as @MrTimH during the golden era of the UK YouTube scene that coincidentally happened at the exact same time as the golden era of my teenage-hood (funny how that happens). Having discovered that information I’m not surprised in the slightest that I enjoyed this film as much as I did. With Me, Myself & the Void Hautekiet knows when to be restrained in the right places, and when to really go for the out-there surreality. Additionally, the film manages to be very economical with likely significant budgetary and subsequently logistical restrictions.

The setting of ‘the Void’ itself is a very clever device in this regard. Minimal set construction would have been necessary for the film to look as good as it does and this all contributes to a very successfully made movie that pulls elements from many genres including comedy, drama, romance, and mystery, with a healthy sprinkling of existential absurdity thrown in to keep us on our toes.

Jack de Sena as Jack, therefore, has a lot to carry and he carries it very well. The events of the film (we discover) are almost entirely viewed from his perspective, literally with the action almost solely playing out within his subconscious. De Sena does the unthinkable, managing to make Jack come across as a genuinely nice and funny guy despite kicking off the film with a self conscious ‘nice guy’ joke that really shouldn’t have done him any favors. Honestly it’s an impressive feat that throughout the film we see our main character act in so many hurtful ways while retaining enough relatability to keep the audience on his side and rooting for him to get better, especially with his outlook looking so bleak. De Sena brings Jack to life (no pun intended) as yes, a damaged and deeply flawed man but one who is ultimately redeemable: worthy of love and capable of change.

All this is not to say that the supporting cast isn’t doing their jobs just as capably. The cast is small and very mighty, each actor brings a depth and purpose to their characters and allows them to feel like real people who really have been friends for as long as the film suggests. The film’s love stories between Jack and his best friend Chris (Chris W. Smith), and his ex-girlfriend Mia (Kelly Marie Tran) are balanced very well and are able to be heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure as the film plays out. Smith gets what was probably the most fun role, but is able to pull off a lot of emotional heavy lifting when it comes down to it. Whereas Tran’s role as (in Chris’s eyes) the unattainable perfect girlfriend was likely the trickier part to play, but she brims with the necessary raw emotion throughout.

Jack’s journey to fully realize the depths of his self-sabotage and wrestle with the reality of his life as a stand-up comedian and the damage this can cause to himself and the people around him feels very personal as well as encompassing a lot of universal themes of self-doubt and mental illness. I also thought the film set up and later dug into interesting philosophical questions surrounding comedy as an art form and the nuances of pursuing comedy as a job. The separation between the comedian’s persona and their “real” personality is explored in interesting ways, set up to be a major theme from the very first scene of Jack and Chris on stage. Chris’s perspective that he was doing comedy as he simply “looked like a stand up” and was “telling jokes” countered by Jack responding that he was really just “kinda ending sentences like punchlines and then people were laughing uproariously”, this exchange functions on one level as a fun meta humor joke about comedians but could be interrogated on a number of levels while also signposting Jack’s personal insecurities about his job and life in general.

The film makes various nods and references to other media, which fit well with the tone rather than being jarring or out of place. Chris gets to parade around in a Sherlock Holmes costume for a while, and the conceit reminded me a lot of the masterpiece late season Bojack Horseman episode “The View from Halfway Down” (dir. Amy Winfrey, 2020), especially as a red sofa is a very prominent part of the set design. Occasionally the score is a little too on the nose and intrudes a little too much on some moments, but other than that it’s a gem. This is a well directed film with an intriguing conceit that does everything it sets out to do with what seems like ease and importantly doesn’t overstay its welcome.