Swiss Army man
Wind of change
released 10 april 2016 | 15 | Blu-ray/dVd
Directors daniel Kwan, daniel scheinert
Cast paul dano, daniel radcliffe
Love trumps hate, they say. Well, sometimes trumps can trump despair, too. This fantasytinged indie comedy celebrates the power of the bottom burp, encouraging us to let rip both literally and metaphorically.
It’s a buddy movie with a body. Paul Dano is Hank, a shipwreck survivor who’s about to commit suicide when Daniel Radcliffe’s Manny washes up on his island. Unfortunately, Manny is dead – but that doesn’t get in the way of a blossoming friendship. Manny soon displays an incredibly varied skill set: his decomposition produces farts so powerful that he can be ridden like a jet-ski, for example. In return, as Radcliffe’s clean-slate stiff slowly and miraculously regains his humanity, Hank teaches him about such important matters as love, sexual attraction, and when it’s appropriate to cut the cheese.
This is one hell of an oddball film, but once you clear the hurdle of accepting a decaying corpse lolling about in every scene, one with a winning charm. The naive Manny’s serial inappropriateness is very amusing, and the duo’s relationship is touching – even though Manny may be merely the hallucination of a starving man. Fans of Michel Gondry will feel at home, as writer/directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan clearly share the French director’s joy in crafting a hand-made universe. And the use of pretty a cappellas to underscore moments of surging emotion works beautifully.
In the end, the messages conveyed here are pretty familiar: carpe diem, leave nothing unsaid and all that. But the fact that the catalyst for Hank’s awakening is a rotting corpse rather than the usual manic pixie dream girl goes a long way towards making them feel fresh.
Extras Commentary with Kwan, Scheinert and others; five deleted scenes (nine minutes); a lengthy Q&A (67 minutes); a Making Of piece (17 minutes); a short featurette on the Manny dummy (four minutes). Ian Berriman
The cave the two hang out in for a while is the same one the Batmobile drives out of in the ’60s Batman show.