Dirs. Annie Girard & Diana Wright

Killing people is hard. Raising them is harder.

In 1 in the Chamber, a comedy-action short directed by Annie Girard and Diana Wright, two female assassins go head-to-head when one of them is accused of selling their company’s trade secrets. The catch? When the hitwoman shows up to bump off her colleague, she finds out that her mark is heavily pregnant. 

This revelation would probably make even the most seasoned hitman, or hitwoman, reconsider their assignment. Not our girl. No baby-to-be is going to stand in her way. When she sees her pregnant colleague, she pulls out her gun and aims at her head.

Our assassin’s only problem? The house has been baby-proofed. Her mark roundhouse kicks her gun into a diaper pail, locking it out of reach. (A hilarious back-and-forth ensues later in which the mom-to-be tries to teach her assassin how to “push-twist” open the child lock.) The women try to strangle each other with breathable sheets and blind each other with ‘no tears’ shampoo. Heads are banged into squishy corner guards and bookcases, which should be thrown, are bolted to the wall, immovable.

Like all great physical comedy, the gag-per-minute ratio in Chamber is ridiculously high. The fighting, also, is highly skilled. In between these prop-gags and punches, the women also maintain witty banter, joking about the ridiculousness of baby paraphernalia and the sky-high expectations placed on new mothers today.

Chamber follows in the footsteps of Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), a movie that upended viewers’ expectations of the action genre. Instead of centering the narrative on a hyper-masculine or hyper-sexualized protagonist, which is the norm for action movies, both Everything and Chamber gave physical power to the powerless and overlooked. In Everything, the action hero was an older woman of color, who owned a laundromat and was in trouble with the IRS. In Chamber, it’s a pregnant woman, and it’s incredibly cathartic to see her deliver a flawless jab-cross. 

At the end of the film, there’s a twist. I won’t spoil it here to preserve your untainted enjoyment, but I will say that the filmmakers make it clear that they are using this comedy about assassins to interrogate real problems for mothers in the workplace. 

Pregnant people exist in a strange lacuna in our society. They are appreciated, but only instrumentally. Once the child is born, a mother’s value plummets. I mean this literally. On average, mothers experience a 5% decrease in salary per child. They are assessed as less competent than non-mothers of equal competency. Bias exists in nearly every industry, even, apparently, in the assassin business.

1 in the Chamber is funny until it’s not. We laugh until the movie’s over. Then the lights come up and we realize we need to wedge our pregnant stomach through the endless rows of movie theater seats that weren’t built to accommodate this type of body. We need to waddle fifteen blocks without help, even though we are tired, hungry, and need to pee. And then we need to stand on the subway home because no one will give up their seat. It makes us mad. Maybe even mad enough to kill.