Fridge: A Comedy

Is not Peter Mullan’s Fridge a comedy rather than tragedy? Sure, it’s sad. The two main characters are as bad off at the end as they were at the beginning, if not worse. They live in a place where no one hears their cries for help. And that silence, that sense of being alone, is tragic. 

But what about the boy? The boy who is stuck in the fridge because of the idiocy of his fellow hooligans? Once we realize that he is stuck in there, we begin to dread something. When the cries for help bring no-one to the rescue, that dread is more evident. There is an inevitability to that which we don’t want to happen. 

What’s more, the two who were wanting to do the right thing spend the boy’s precious little time drinking, arguing, and doing nothing good. They fall short of our expectations. In our minds, it is now inevitable that the boy will die.


 
But no. What actually happens is the unexpected. The lid is lifted up, and the woman cries because of the dead boy inside. Yet he is not dead. He is alive, and that lifts our spirits just as it lifts the spirits of the characters in the film. The dead is rejoined with the living. That is what comedy is.