Death is a Great Disguiser
BETTER DAYS – a film by Joan Carr-Wiggin – (limited spoilers) ⁓
Kate
It is a tale of death and doubt, and it begins on Eric’s birthday, but we don’t know which birthday it was, because only one candle is on the cake. She lets her husband sleep in, then brings the cake to him upstairs, but Eric has died in his sleep and she has put on her angel costume for nothing.
Kate (Sonja Smits) met her husband at a Halloween party she did not want to attend. She was dressed as an angel, and Eric hopped over to her in his pink bunny suit. It was love at first role play. After they married, Kate would sometimes come home from work to find him dressed as a rabbit for no particular reason and watching television. Eric was a nice guy, so she humoured his costume fetish and actually found it charming after a while. She forgot that she didn’t want to go to that Halloween party in the first place.
Jenna and Ralph
Jenna (Alix Sideris), Kate’s neighbour and almost best friend, has been clandestinely involved with Ralph (Dean Armstrong) for quite some time. (Ralph is Jenna’s married employer.) Soon after Eric’s death, Ralph’s wife Marigold dies. When Jenna pops by to tell Kate about that, she finds Kate wearing the angel costume, and remarks: “That nightie’s a bit ‘Handmaid’s Tale’, don’t you think?” Jenna believes herself the heir apparent to Ralph’s house, family, and fortune, but her princess costume is hidden in her thoughts. She also believes that her situation is similar to Kate’s, and she might not be entirely wrong.
Once Jenna leaves, Kate dons a bear costume (another inheritance from her late husband) and meets a friendly food delivery person who plays along with her bear fantasy. She invites him to come over later to visit.
Chandri and Leah
The delivery guy brings two friends with him, and the three of them, Dylan (Luke Atteledon-Francis), Nisha (Kerrin Cochrane) and Hector (Darius Rathe) dress up in more of Eric’s costumes, becoming the angel, the rooster, and the dog. Jenna arrives with a casserole in the middle of all this, and finds the situation disturbing enough to report it to Kate’s children.
Kate has a son named Jason (Gregory Ambrose Calderone), who is single, overly well-groomed, and totally self-absorbed. She also has a daughter named Leah (Sarah Hinding), who is married to Chandni (Sugenja Sri), who works at a bookstore. They will create problems for their mother by trying to do what they think they are expected to do.
The Three Furries – Dylan, Nisha, and Hector
Kate walks into some nearby woods, lets out a primal scream, then meets Dylan, Nisha, and Hector at a nearby restaurant. All are in costume, but Kate is wearing the angel outfit this time and Nisha has switched to the chicken suit. The four commiserate about relatives, the capitalist overlords, and others they perceive as oppressors, and Kate descends into a miasma of regret that makes everyone else at the table uncomfortable. When she gets home, Kate takes a combination of pills in what could be a suicide attempt, but she reads the instructions first, so maybe she is careful to take a non-lethal dose. Jenna returns, and doesn’t realize anything is wrong until Kate faceplants on the living room carpet.
Kate napping with Eric’s bunny suit and a vodka bottle. — Sonja Smits also stars as Joanne in Ryan North’s road trip movie DRIFTING SNOW.
The saga of Jenna and Ralph continues, mostly in Jenna’s head. She makes an uninvited visit to Ralph’s house soon after Marigold’s funeral, and it does not go well. Ralph is quite mean to Jenna and clearly does not share most of her fantasies. He shoves Kate and Jenna into a bathroom and tells them to stay there until everyone else leaves. None of this will deter Jenna from continuing to be Ralph’s mistress, or from wanting it to become more.
Chandni and Leah come up with the questionable strategy of setting Kate up with Chandni’s bookstore boss Henry (Blair Williams). Things starts out badly, but Kate tuns it around by asking Henry directly if he wants to have sex, and it turns out that he does. This sets up a rather complex ending, the important part of which is not the outcome of her relationship with Henry, or whether she visits the three furries again. The important part is that, at the end of the story, she goes into the woods in her angel costume, spreads her wings, and screams.