This is like Harold and Maude.  Except there is no Harold, and Maude is the one with the death obsession.  So, really not like it at all.  However, it is like Nothing in the Dark from the original Twilight Zone.  But reversed; so, also not a good match.

Barbara LeMay loves going to funerals.  She has just gone to one and even slid her hand along the coffin as it passed.  She complements the preacher, but admits she doesn’t know anyone there, horizontal or vertical.  At home, she lovingly describes every detail to her son Jason.  He says her obsession “is not good, is not healthy, it is morbid.”

That night, after her son has left, a man breaks into her house.  When Barbara sees him, he pulls a gun on her and says, “Don’t move, don’t call the cops!  I’ll kill you, I swear!”  Then he collapses from pre-existing condition, namely a gunshot wound.  Barbara makes him comfortable, but tells him it looks bad for him.  She promises to wait with him.  They don’t have to wait long, as Mr. Death appears immediately.

Barbara is fairly calm seeing Mr. Death, but she seems surprised that he is not surprised that he can see her.  Wouldn’t she expect him to know the rules better than her?  In all the funerals she has attended, and with all the people she has seen die in the hospital, she has never seen Mr. Death.  She attributes his visibility this night to her frequent proximity to him.  Wake up and smell the coffee, baby!  Even the dying crook can’t see him because “it isn’t his time.”

When death approaches the dying man, Barbara offers her soul in place of his.  Death asks why.  She says because, “I can see the beauty in you.  I can.  I see it in so many ways.  The peace, the freedom, the tranquility,the poignant fragile beauty of their one final exhalation, the gathering of the soul, the ceremony.”  Correction, this is becoming more like TZ’s One for the Angels where an old guy runs his yap all night so Death misses an appointment.

Death says he can’t take her.  But he says he has seen her many times and noticed she “does not run from his touch, but seeks to embrace it.”  He says, “I could no more take you than take your end-table because neither one lives” or matches his sofa.

He leans over the crook as he struggles to breathe.  Death says, even now, the man is more alive than Barbara.  Death takes the man’s soul and becomes invisible to Barbara.  She says he “can’t just leave, we’ve been together through so much.”  She says she has no one.  Her son doesn’t need her, and Death has taken all her other friends and family.  “They’re all with you now!”

The next night — after having the dead body taken away that morning — Barbara gets dolled up in a nice evening gown.  Death shows up and asks, “Have I hurt you?”  There are only two sappy ways the story could end — either Barbara lives or Barbara dies.  Amazingly, neither of these options are used.

The story took an unexpected turn and ended up like TZ’s A Game of Pool except the motivations and the response of the main character are different.  So forget I mentioned it.  It was a little talky and the sappy score was dreadful.  I liked the curveball at the end, and Janet Leigh did a nice job.  Stephen McHattie was a great Mr. Death, but isn’t he always?