
This scene near the end should tell you a lot about what she puts up with from the other characters.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.
Heartland’s 33rd edition runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry…
…and we come at last to the final theatrical recount in this very special MCC miniseries: We Strangers (not to be confused with last year’s All of Us Strangers), a dramedy that premiered at South by Southwest back in March and caught my eye in Heartland’s listings on the strength of its star Kirby Howell-Baptiste (whose recent roles, including this one, have been billed mononymously as just “Kirby”). Best known to geeks as Dream’s big sister Death in Netflix’s Sandman, I’ve also seen her in Veronica Mars season 4 (as a bartender who doesn’t appreciate being a murder suspect), the Apple TV+ series Sugar (as Colin Farrell’s handler), the Cruella prequel (as young Anita Darling), HBO’s Barry (blink and miss her as a recurring student in Gene Cousineau’s acting class), and so on and so on. Okay, I’ll stop now.
Suffice it to say she’s no stranger to me in that sense, though “stranger” can mean different things, and switch context at any moment without notice, even when you’re finally #1 on the call sheet.