[Editorial] Disability and Horror: Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break (2021)

Thirty-one years ago, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, in the hopes that by enforcing certain standards in business practices and design, and raising awareness on behalf of the disabled community, quality of life for people with disabilities would improve as they gained access to basic necessities, from the ability to leave their own homes to public bathrooms they could use.

While a lot of us regard the ADA as an admirable but mostly neglected and unenforced piece of legislation, watching films from around the world frequently reminds me that for many countries, even the basic precepts of the ADA, such as accessibility and equitable treatment, are lacking.

In the recent Fantasia Film Festival comedy, Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break, a British lack of appropriate accommodations and mean-spirited officious bureaucracy act as the catalyst to a gleeful spree of bloody vengeance. An elderly mother accompanies her son to a talent scouting competition, wanting to see him perform. In spite of careful planning, the son, Paul, mixes up the dates, effectively throwing all of the planning out the window, hoping that he can still make it to the competition with his elderly mother in her wheelchair nonetheless. As those of us with disabilities know all too well, throwing the planning out the window puts you at the mercy of systems that almost never have your back. Through a series of tragic events spun comically, the mother and son suffer many indignities on the way to the talent show. An endless cast of self-righteous characters proclaim themselves to be performing their job “by the book” or worse, protesting how deeply offensive reasonable requests are to them.

I’d like to say this is entirely a work of fiction, but as far as I’m aware, only the bloody vengeance is. I’ve spent a significant portion of my life in England over the years, and every single situation that arises in Lunch Break reflects an equivalent experience I have had at some point in the last 30 years. I’ve encountered the petty bureaucracy of the train station manager who needs to lay a ramp for the mother. I’ve encountered both the attitude and the practical effects of it (i.e. missing an important train, waiting for hours) throughout the tube and rail services. I’ve even directly encountered the line snapped at the mother, “Madam, if it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” The simmering resentment surfaces just long enough to make it clear that the general lack of helpfulness is an entirely deliberate decision born out of a sense of injustice that other people need something different.

As the mother needs water to take her pills, Paul attempts to get a cup of water for her that can be taken out into the street, as, predictably, her wheelchair will not fit into the doorway of any of the shops. Again, this is a challenge I know well. Most shop owners, just like Johnny Vegas’ culturally-appropriating tea shop owner, insist that you pay for something overpriced and sit down, even when a life-saving sip is all you need. I’d like to say there’s a special place in Hell for people who steal cabs from the disabled, but sadly, I have no such confirmation yet. Luckily though, the sanctimonious grotesquery of a priest and a woman who claim “everyone’s mum is in a wheelchair” before stealing said cab, is met with some beautiful viscera and honest to goodness grotesquery in this film.

The pins that are set up and knocked down in this script by Brook Driver, Nick Gillespie, and Matthew White, are all perfectly positioned and perfectly proportional to the cultural context they represent. So it is the purest form of wish fulfillment when Paul wreaks his bloody vengeance on this pack of hyenas, all while streaming the action live from his chest online. The confluence of YouTube culture, disability politics, and brilliantly gory kills give this film a potent punch, particularly for those of us who have seen these horrible injustices up close and personal.  I never knew I needed the beautiful catharsis this movie provides, or that one film could remind me in a nutshell of why the ADA was an important step forward for America. While there is no one legislative fix for ableism, and probably not one easy murdery fix either, I love that content like this is out there to remind people that reasonable accommodations are not too much to ask, and that structural injustices, like inaccessible buildings and transport and bureaucracy, are just as important to battle as resentful attitudes.   

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