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How well do Americans take to satire and parody? Generally, American comedy tends to be fairly broad, obvious, pratfalls and slapstick, and, as the decades have gone on, a move from innuendo to straightforward and crass language and situations. This is not the case here. This one is far more similar to the ironic parody of Saturday Night Live.

The structure of the screenplay is clever. Initially, there is a focus on one character, Sue, the timid housewife, trying to reinforce her self-confidence with mantras about her being important and significant. (And part of the parody is that this character is played, effectively and credibly, by the tall Allison Janney, so strong in performances in I, Tonya and The West Wing.) It is her birthday, and she has to buy her own cake, with work associates happily buying a cake for another worker and ignoring her, and her husband (Matthew Modine) forgetting her birthday altogether.

In fact, this will all lead to an extraordinary tangle involving her husband, a motel, a liaison, Sue surprising him, his heart attack – and, the police or not, and disposing of the body.

But, Sue doesn’t go to the police. What follows is an extraordinarily complex black comedy of errors, the discovery that the husband was laundering money at the bank, his delinquent brother, Pete (Jimi Simpson whose wife is now pregnant with twins) is entangled with two tough petty criminals (Awkwafina and Clifton Collins Jr), who have no scruple in killing, and standover tactics on behalf of a local businessman and the laundering of his cash. There is a large bag of cash buried with the body.

As if that isn’t enough, the brother is reforming, works for the hard-nosed, wisecracking proprietor of a store (Wanda Sykes in stand-up comedy mode) who has seen all the TV films about how gangsters work and wants to be in on the act, including robbing a jewellery store to pay for a ransom.

It all gets very complicated (as if it wasn’t complicated enough) when Sue’s half-sister, Mila Kunis, a minor TV personality, wants to interview Sue. But, there is a more high-powered television interviewer on a more prominent channel, played unctuously by Juliette Lewis, and Sue would rather be on her program. Sue discovers that, while she might put herself down, media limelight is more than attractive.

Oh, yes. There are also the police – Sue reporting her husband missing, their staking out her house, bemused by her behaviour, tracking down the brother of the store…, the bumptious woman Sue’s husband was having the affair with.

But, this being a black comedy, the writer has no particular concern about characters being killed off. And, mostly they are. All kinds of surprise scenes, variations on the action thriller conventions, always some surprises. And, despite Sue almost exposed by the truth, she is able to sail through all the hazards, even to writing a book about her experiences, sharing them with the host on the TV show who has also written a book.

A good example of how Americans can do satirical black comedy. If you would like another film in the same vein, a recommendation is Bad Times at the El Royale (also with a large and interesting complement of character actors and comics).