Nobody says it like Walken

In Back in Black, Christopher Walken's delivery turns a flat "Shut up" into something that lands like affection. That strangeness sets the tone for the whole comedy.

“Walken's distinctive diction turns "Shut up" into a moving "I love you."”

A funeral home in trouble

Walken plays Clyde Mortimer, an undertaker descended from undertakers, running the family parlor with wife Autumn (Jane Curtin) and orphaned granddaughter Sam. Business is dead, in the wrong way.

No one is dying

Clyde rages that the small town has stopped supplying corpses, and that the pandemic should have been a boom for morticians until in-person gatherings collapsed.

“no one dying is no way to live!”

Sam and her screwdriver

The first shot is Sam building a coffin. With the family facing ruin, she starts loosening screws around town, and deaths follow at a grocery store, a construction site, a motel pool.

“Back in Black is like Dexter with a cozy crime twist.”

The cop is a subplot

Deputy Donna smells a pattern while her sheriff insists she's wrong. But the cat-and-mouse stays background noise to Sam's life with her grandparents and the romances that start at a victim's funeral.

The silent one

Sam never speaks. Ella Ballentine plays her as the Teller to Walken's Penn, running excitement, doubt and pleasure across her face in a line that goes back to Chaplin and Keaton.

“Sam doesn't need to speak for her grandfather to know her heart, even if he doesn't know her secrets.”

No comforting compromise

Dexter only killed killers, so you could root for him. Sam kills whoever is convenient. Dale, a grocery manager kind to everyone, dies locked in a freezer, and nobody can pretend he deserved it.

“Murphy won't make a joke of murder.”