Ryan McNeil
When you get married, there’s an unspoken agreement that you enter into. Whether you know it or not, you are agreeing to find lost things, reach high things, go pick-up desired things, and help dispose of icky things.
Disposing of a body your spouse has killed? Turns out that’s part of the unspoken agreement too.
As WHOOPS! begins, we watch Rose Clements (Elaine Glover) walk down a darkened street after hours. She’s on her way home, carrying her high heels in-had, minding her own business, and only slightly worried about her safety. Behind her, a jogger approaches with his hood pulled up…but thanks to a moment of panic, Rose believes that he means her harm and takes a swing. She impales the jogger’s temple with her stiletto, killing him instantly.
Freaked over what to do, she calls her husband Dave (Philip Rowson) and confesses that “It’s happened again”.
That’s right folks – this isn’t Rose’s first kill. Not even her first kill via blind panic.
That’s already happened once before, again while walking down a darkened street after-hours. Then – like now – Dave felt it best to sidestep responsibility. So together Dave and Rose dispose of the bodies. However, they aren’t heartless killers. Upon discovering that their victim holds an organ donor card, they haphazardly remove what they can and leave it in an unmarked cooler in front of the local hospital.
Unfortunately, Rose and Dave aren’t all that good at hiding evidence, and the local authorities begin to look into the deaths…and they don’t care whether they were followed with the word “whoops” or not.
WHOOPS! is a film that is well-suited to the beginning of a humid and sticky summer. It is light, breezy, and comes built with a certain degree of cheek. It’s not out to postulate, shock, or subvert. It wants to refresh us with mild absurdity, and treat us to something sweet.
While nobody is going to confuse WHOOPS! with the next big thing, at its core there’s a central idea that rings true for so many of us. Time and again, so many of us want to keep control. We see the car careening into the ditch, but believe that if we steer into the skid that we can avoid the chaos. We all want to look like heroes, look like we have the answer. We’re afraid to admit that we’re out of our depth – afraid to ask for help. It’s difficult to articulate why: perhaps we’re afraid of seeming weak, perhaps some of us just don’t know how. However, as we see in WHOOPS!, owning up to being out of our depth is not such a bad thing. It could have kept a few more people alive, kept Rose’s nerves from becoming quite so frazzled, and underlined what happened as a pure accident.
It’s pride and panic that lead to so many of our mistakes nowadays – with a heavy emphasis on pride. Perhaps the moral of WHOOPS! is that if we had a little bit less of it, we might not make such a mess of things.
WHOOPS! plays NXNE 2014 tomorrow afternoon, Saturday June 14th – 12:30pm at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. (official website)