Kelly & Co.

A friend of mine committed suicide in 2003 and two days after this person committed suicide I received a videotape in the mail, and before they'd done it recorded a video suicide note and mailed it to me.

And it was the most horrifying thing you could ever imagine watching someone scream and shout knowing they're going to die as soon as they press that stop button. It's horrific.

- Murali K Thalluri, interview with Michael Turtle on the the ABC, August 1, 2006.

Tragic. Terrible. Two Thirty 7 is dedicated to this friend, Kelly, and one of the central characters is named after her.

However, read these lines again, carefully. Do you notice that they are inherently, unambiguously absurd?

With all due respect to Murali, this story strikes us as being very strange.

The events, according to Murali, are chronologically thus:

• The friend turned on a video camera.
• The friend screamed and shouted as she recorded a suicide video note.
• The friend stopped the camera.
• The friend, despite being in an extraordinarily fragile mental state, wrapped and addressed the tape to Murali and added several dollars worth of stamps.
• The friend took it to the nearest postbox.
• The friend returned home and committed suicide.

No, wrong. Murali has made it very clear that the friend committed suicide immediately after stopping the video camera. He writes in the film's Cannes pressbook:

Watching someone scream, cry, shout, and beg as they prepare themselves to carry through with the act of taking their own life is something that haunts me to this day. (Emphasis ours)

Kelly can't have mailed the videotape, then. Who did?

The parents of this dead teen?

What parent would post such a videotape immediately after discovering their child's dead body?

For that matter, what friend or sibling or paramedic or doctor or police officer would think doing so was in any way a priority?

Normally, we would consider questioning such a thing to be beyond the pale, abhorrent, supremely insensitive. Publishing fake reviews of the film and mockumentaries inflating the duration of applause at Cannes are one thing, but this is an order of magnitude more serious.

We hope we are wrong. We sincerely apologise if we are.

However, like so much behind this film, this is just plain fishy. If anyone can clarify this puzzling story and set us right, please do so via the comments function below. Your message will not be published if you prefer.