Swiss Army Man

Get ready for a deep dive into perverse loneliness that you can laugh at raucously while still seeing how depraved this story really is.  Swiss Army Man tells the incredibly insane story of Hank (Paul Dano), a downtrodden man on the verge of committing suicide.  As he hangs himself he sees a a body washed ashore on this deserted island.  This is where everything goes pear shaped.  The dead body’s name is Manny, (Daniel Radcliffe) which we find out later, but first it just thrashes violently with flatulence.  Yep…this film loves its farts.  When the body finally speaks, the two become the best of friends and they work together to try and escape the island they are stranded on.

Going down the rabbit hole doesn’t quite describe this film.  There is so much trickery involved here.  The Daniels’ directing team come from the music video world, and they laced in every trick of the trade they’ve ever learned.  This film is beautifully shot.  The adventure is captured majestically, even if most of the time that adventure revolves around farts and boners.  Yes…that’s correct.  On the surface this film is flatulence and erection filled toilet humor which is hilarious, but starts to stale until you get to the depth of the plot.

As I described in the beginning, this movie is perverse, and ultimately a tale of loneliness.  And what the mind will do to stave off madness.  Or maybe, its too late, and the madness has crept in.    Careful for SPOILERS AHEAD.  Its emphatically difficult to describe the roller-coaster mind screw Swiss Army Man is without giving away some key plot points.

SPOILERS START – It turns out, Paul Dano is a psycho kid that lived a lonely life, liked a certain girl, and basically camped out behind her house, took pictures of her, survived off of stealing food from her house and bringing it back to his fortress in the woods down by the beach behind her place.  Throughout the film you see this constant stream of garbage piling up in the cave Hank and Manny stay in.  Then Manny sees a picture of the girl, starts to fall in love and get crazy thrashing erections.

This film is a love story.  As depraved as it is, as wildly immature as it seems, there’s a deep layer of love story here.  Its all in the mad mind of a lonely man but its brought out so beautifully it cannot be denied how well written and directed and especially acted, that this was.  Dano and Radcliffe were phenomenal together.  Radcliffe especially deserves every award its possible to receive for acting.  Even with some strong films coming out the later half of the year, I can’t think of one that will produce a better performance than his in Swiss Army Man.  He played a dead body re-learning the world through the eyes of Hank.  He learned love, hate, pain, loss, lust, and anguish.  The physical performance was a revelation.  I’m willing to say that this is his best work ever.

Paul Dano was good as well. Not powerhouse but a great complimentary performance to the show stealing Radcliffe.  Again I say this was love story between an obsessed man and a dead body.  It’s all mental.  Everything is in his head, yet he projects all his feelings into Manny and then becomes the girl they both desire, dressing in drag and going on dates with the dead man.

The perfect description of this film is that it goes from perverted and immature to deep and though provoking and ends in the middle somewhere between wow and WTF??!!!  I cannot in good conscience give away the ending because the ride this film takes you on will be ruined if you know how things work out.  Its only right to be vague and say that Swiss Army Man was NOT what I thought it was going in, it was NOT what I thought it was while I experienced it by the halfway point, and its NOT what I thought it was when near the end I felt I had a grasp on what was happening.  All of those are very good things.  This has surpassed The Nice Guys as the best film of the year so far in my opinion.  Seriously go watch this immediately.

In closing I can promise one thing. You may not look at yourself the same after seeing this film.  As funny as the movie was, it also shed light on some serious issues of the dark side of the mind.  The things we are capable of when our thirst for human connection is never quenched.  The fact that this was written at all shows the imagination is only one step away from actual insanity.  There are plenty of works of art in the world that show the darkness possibles from the soul of man, this is just another angle to look from.  You will laugh, you may well cry, those moments are in there, and you’ll definitely wish you could rewind and do a double take.  This film feels like we are all missing something.  Probably because we are.  Intentionally.  Best film of the year so far as I’ve said above.  It’s worthy of your money and support.