SFF NOTES: Swiss Army Man (2016, Dirs. Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert)

It would be difficult to step into Swiss Army Man, a film that has worn its "farting corpse movie" moniker with unabashed pride, without some (not insignificant) level of incredulity.

It is pretty clear within the first two or three minutes that this Paul Dano (alive)/Daniel Radcliffe (dead) two-hander is going to ride its higher-than-high concept for all its worth, and from its base starting point (the farting corpse part), the film is an exercise in winning over its audience.

For me, that was a bumpy ride. There is no denying the film’s originality, but that’s pretty much a given from the get go. Directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels) get quite ingenious with their fart jokes and others pertaining to various other bodily functions that don’t usually get a look-in when such high profile actors are attached. Much of the first act was met with sporadic bursts of laughter from our audience as people hit their individual buy-in thresholds.

I wasn’t immune. Apparently I like a fart joke as much as the next cinephile. But as the Daniels (and you can throw Radcliffe into that gang) started to push deeper into their outcast-explains-social-mores shtick, I got slightly irritated. The laughs kept coming (as did the parade of WTFs!?!?) but emotional connection didn’t. Eventually, the Daniels failed to convince me that they knew exactly what to do with their strange little tale.

If I can get political for a second, in the current climate of gendered battlelines in film making, it is also difficult to dismiss concerns over the film’s cultural worthiness. It is probably a slightly deeper critique than the film itself warrants (and kudos to the Daniels for grasping at worthiness from the thematic bowels), but when women struggling to get films greenlit see a film about a farting dead man hitting the screens, there is no wonder there are questions being raised. Personally, I only bring the fact up because, behind the dressing, Swiss Army Man is just another film about an outsider/stalker guy processing his socio-sexual ostracism.

At least on that level, we’ve seen all this before.

★★★

Trailer:

Swiss Army Man screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.