Ever wonder what happens to your wayward soul when you die? Many do, but since no one came back to tell us, the concept of the afterlife remains enshrouded in a thick impenetrable fog.
Filmmaker Boris Kievsky seems to have a pretty good idea, though, and shares with us his vision of the proverbial Heaven or Hell as part of his latest cut, Purgatory Inc., starring acting chameleon Konstantin Lavysh across from “straight man” Patrick Cavanaugh.
The film is a tongue-in-cheek dose of smart-as-hell comedy, kitted out with the one-liners to prove it. Yet again, as he’d done in Unbreaking Up, we’re served up another deeply meaningful story line with compelling dialogues that really gets us thinking about our personal lives and place in the world.
In the film, the biblical in-between of “Purgatory” has been recast in the role of a no-nonsense business concern, Purgatory Inc. Purgatory here has the gravitas and solemnity of a buttoned-down insurance adjuster’s office at the turn of the century. Incoming souls, like Cavanaugh’s hapless Christopher McNamee, are”processed, not judged,” while the firm’s “employees,” like Lavysh’s Clerk, are quick to inform us that mere plebes like him are evaluated for the volume of souls they’re able to process through Heaven or Hell. Either way, it hardly matters to the shady powers that be, so long as there’s brisk traffic through the door leading to “the remainder of eternal non-corporeal existence.”
Co-leads Lavysh and Cavanaugh exude great on-screen sympatico, playing marvelously off each other’s particular shtick. Lavysh, as Clerk, is a straight-laced dandy bored stiff with his thankless paper-pushing desk job which he mans around the clock. His boss — an ominous figure we never discover the true identity of though strangely resembling the Devil — is ever-vigilant, keeping Purgatory Inc.’s factory wheels spinning.
In keeping with the storied Purgatory’s apparent indeterminate nature, a soul’s “personnel file” is always left open for re-interpretation. Religious affiliation, while vitally important as a self-identification device during corporeal existence on earth, is a fluid concept during Purgatory’s transitional phase. The Clerk tells us, how, with the mighty stroke of a pen and a soul’s full acquiescence, Catholics can instantly be remade into Protestants, changing theirs (and their family’s) ultimate destinies forever…for a price, of course. I’ll resist revealing the story twist, because it’s just about the cleverest thing about this sweet piece of brilliant thought-provocation.
Here’s the trailer:
Purgatory, Inc. stirs up a hornet’s nest of questions about the nature of faith and human beings’ dogged determination to live out the tenets organized religion’s dogma in the face of a deeply uncertain future or afterlife. If the fabled Purgatory is really as much of a bazaar as Kievsky depicts it to be, I mean, what’s the point?
Pascal’s Wager comes to mind: “If I disbelieve and there is indeed an afterlife, I lose. But if I believe and there isn’t, in fact, this ‘Heaven,’ what I have lost?”
Again, for a short, Purgatory Inc. packs a cognitive wallop. Though I wouldn’t expect anything less from the acid pen Boris Kievsky, a master cinematic conjurer if there ever was one in Hollywood.
If you haven’t yet seen Kievsky’s first work, Unbreaking Up, starring Holt Boggs and Nina Avetisova, it’s right here.
