Director-writer Joe Bartone drags the audience forcibly through his unique vision of L.A. as hell in Everything Will Be Fine in the End. A young woman named George (Elsa Kennedy) and her aimless hang-out buddies Kai (Steven Michael Martin) and Renka (Cheska Zaide) are living at the edge of poverty and in perpetual crisis, banging around seedier parts of the city on their skateboards. George owes money to a skeevy older man named Buzz (Kent Harper), a drug-addled private investigator (or so he says) who drives a repurposed police car. He insists George have sex with him to help pay off her debt, but unsatisfied with that being enough, he takes her dog Leo (whom she stole from someone else) away from her as well. This is life at the bottom. Everybody wants out, but no one knows how to break free or where they would go from here.
Life for the four main characters caught in a cycle of pointless crimes and drugs continues to circle the drain until they are all forced to confront their purposeless existence when they panic and murder a woman (Holly Rockwell) after breaking into her home. The woman’s ghost follows them around, looking on as they try to decide how to deal with what happened.
“…all forced to confront their purposeless existence when they panic and murder a woman…”
The primary story is decorated with tangential characters and their tales. These are colorful slices of life more than they are plot-driving devices. We meet a would-be drag queen named Mank (Jonathan Mankuta), as well as a blind street shaman (Turen Robinson) who serves as the Greek chorus leading player for this tragi-comedy. Randomly throughout the film, he delivers wise observations about existence.
After their random, unintentional act of murder, the three wind up going to Buzz for help, but the viewer is left to discover whether he’ll actually help or try to capitalize on the situation for his own benefit. Every scene is percolating with potential violence and sex that sometimes explodes into reality. The trio of not-so-hardened criminals has sex in the germ-phobic woman’s house, less out of passion than as a “f**k you” to the organized, plastic slip-covered life she has constructed for herself. When they’ve killed her, they leave her covered in the same kind of poly sheet that her sofa has on it.
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