Content warning: suicide. In his directorial debut “On the Count of Three,” which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Jerrod Carmichael shows a rare prowess for balancing strikingly different tones. Though “On the Count of Three” has echoes of older films, such as “Thelma & Louise” or “Harold and Maude,” Carmichael’s film uniquely finds a hilarious comic undercurrent in the sense of all-pervading desolation felt by its characters. We are first introduced to Carmichael’s Val and his best friend Kevin (Christopher Abbott, in his second appearance of the festival after “The World to Come”) as they stand in an empty lot behind a strip club, aiming pistols at each other in stark daylight. From the get-go, Val and Kevin have an unspoken bond that, despite the bleakness of this opening image, shows through in Carmichael and Abbott’s gazes — they’re moments away from firing on one another, but it’s clear that the two aren’t antagonists. Instead, Val and Kevin feel strangely synchronous, like two sides of the same coin.