The satirical point that director D.W. Thomas makes in Too Late is a stroke of genius. According to Tom Becker’s screenplay, the world of stand-up comics and the venues in which they perform is almost literally dog-eat-dog. While dead weight is shunted off to obscurity, talented comics enter the gaping maw of a venue owner who happens to have a taste for human flesh.
In case the point is lost on the viewer, the promise of slow digestion in the stomach of a real-life monster is a stand-in for certain kinds of contracts. It’s also an allegory of surprising relevance, and Becker has positioned the story’s protagonist in the most curious place in relation to the audience’s sympathy. Violet (Alyssa Limperis) is well-aware of her boss’s supernatural nightlife. Indeed, she even sends the unwitting victims of his voracious support directly to his … office. We have all heard the stories of the domineering executive, the casting couch and the young people put into horrific situations far beyond their ability to control it.
Curiously, Becker and director D.W. Thomas (making her feature debut) have given us the complicit assistant as the protagonist. Violet is not only a cog in the machine of her boss Bob (Ron Lynch), a club owner of some renown, but a willing participant in his overall scheme to lure talent and never again allow them to see the light of day. Becker and Thomas do a pretty good job of melding the satirical point with the allegory in a very tight frame. At only 79 minutes (including the end credits), the movie doesn’t exactly dig deep into either of its subjects, but it pays lip service in ways that are simultaneously funny and horrifying. The performances also help, especially from Lynch as a literal monster whose casual psychopathy is genuinely unnerving (and the makeup effects are convincing and not at all cheap, too).
The plot is slightly less ambitious than the themes they convey, but perhaps that is to be expected from such a miniaturized work. Violet juggles Bob’s time demands, booking comics for his show and running her own club with its own performers. But when she meets Jimmy (Will Weldon), a promising talent and nice guy, what she does for her boss seems less tenable.
The film lives indelibly in the world of stand-up comedy, and thank goodness that a movie set in this world gives us characters who are genuinely funny. Some of the best laughs, indeed, come from the glimpses that Thomas gives us of comics in their element, from less familiar faces to spirited supporting turns from Mary Lynn Rajskub as a wise comic who offers some pragmatic advice to Violet and Fred Armisen as a harried technician.
As for the central premise, Too Late has the audacity to present its heroine with a forked path for the rest of her life and, somehow, the ability to have things both ways. One isn’t entirely sure that such a gambit works, so the final five minutes are kind of muddled. But this is a sly, thoughtful, cheerfully grotesque satire, and such brief missteps barely register.
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