by Dov Kornits
Starring Sean Keenan and Susie Porter, Help! Everything is Fine is not too dissimilar in intent to Gregor Jordan’s Tropfest winning Cannes selected breakout short, Swinger, about a suicide attempt that turns funny.
In the case of Help! Everything is Fine, it’s a young man (Keenan) who is picked up by his mum (Porter), after his suicide attempt kills an innocent person.
Interestingly, director Isaac Brown’s previous film, also written by Harry Borland, Jump, made in 2020, was also about a suicide. “Obviously thematically they’re similar; Jump looks at two strangers meeting the moment before tragedy, then looking at ways strangers can connect with each other. Whereas with this one, most of the film lives in that space immediately after something quite tragic happens and with someone you know very, very well.”
“After making Jump, we were really interested in marrying tragedy with comedy,” admits Brown. “And dealing with something really, really hard, really hard in a way that is really very human. We do cope in all sorts of ways, including laughing maybe when you feel like you shouldn’t. I think that’s where the comedy comes from in this short, the disconnect between what the situation that they’re in and then how they want to deal with it, as if everything is fine when it’s really not.
“I’m really interested in stories that are at that intersection of comedy and tragedy. I think walking that tight rope, can be really, really funny at times. And life can be tragic at times and that’s what I’m most drawn to. I like movies where I can laugh and cry.”
Going to drama school and crewing on film sets before finding his groove as a photographer [after hanging around film sets with his camera operator dad], Isaac Brown is now well and truly transitioning to directing. “I’ve done a heap of music videos. We just finished a run of music videos with Genesis Owusu. We went and shot some stuff in Ghana and then in Europe together, which was pretty cool.
Help! Everything is Fine is a performance piece, reliant on strong performances from the lead actors. “I’d never worked with Susie, I’ve known Sean for a number of years, and we’ve spoken about trying to do something together. Once we had a script for this, he was super on board and then we were looking through and we were super lucky when we sent the script to Susie. She really connected with it, and she loved Jump first short, and Sean and Susie of course have a background together,” he says and we realise that they were mother and son in the Puberty Blues series.
“Obviously with the mother and son, there’s that endless history. So, there was that instant comfort, which was really good for going to the places that we did with this film.”
Help! Everything is Fine was financed by Brown and his writer Harry Borland. “We are developing Help! Everything is Fine into a longer form piece,” Brown tells us. “I think that the story’s just so rich when we start brainstorming about what could possibly happen if you expanded the story.
“Either way, I think we having a really strong calling card, I think this really speaks to the sort of tone and world that Harry and I like to work in. It was important for us to make something that really felt like us to then use that to continue to make things going forward.”
Help! Everything is Fine in the Best of Australian Shorts 4 program at Flickerfest on 25 January 2026. Click here for more information.
