Kritiken

Its single (and not particularly funny) joke about a farting corpse quickly wore thin. It starred Daniel Radcliffe, whose choices since Harry Potter have tended to be strong – Horns, for example, is one of the better horror films of recent years – but Radcliffe (or his agent) clearly missed the mark in signing on for this uninspiring nonsense.

If Swiss Army Man is occasionally annoying, it is not a case of rookie directors letting their imaginations run away with them. The film is not simply undisciplined: rather, it questions the efficacy of discipline as an end in itself; that may not be an original question but it is still worth asking, especially in the form of a gently absurdist, unapologetically twee crowd-pleaser.

The adeptness with which Swiss Army Man establishes its themes suggests not just DANIELS's collaborative genius but the many hands of artisanal production.

Imagine a depressed Wes Anderson got high, watched a bunch of Farrelly Brothers films, then went out into the woods and remade Lord of the Fliesas a buddy comedy. That's Swiss Army Man, the infamous Sundance Film Festival sensation about a delusional cast away who befriends a farting corpse that's washed up on the beach. Let that stink in for a second.

The film is elastic, transmogrifying from a psychological drama into a literally excremental comedy and then a hard-edged survival picture, occasionally embracing the cosmic and turning into an emo hipster answer to "2001: A Space Odyssey." And yet the emotional temperatures of the movie fluctuate so intuitively from moment to moment, and the situations and editing choices along with them, that there's ultimately no point trying to deal with "Swiss Army Man" on any terms but its own.

A sort of Apatovian bromance by way of Quentin Dupieux's 2010 alt-comedy of spontaneous reanimation Rubber, all the while moving along at the antic clip of a kids' movie... It's hard not to appreciate the juvenile exuberance of many of these high jinks, and the hand-cranked effects with which many of them are rendered. The gags keep their novelty for longer than you'd expect, but the film falters when it comes time to drum up the requisite dramatic interest.

Weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented, "Swiss Army Man" is about how one man's dead body nudges another man back to life. Impossible to categorize, this stunningly original mix of the macabre and the magical combines comedy, tragedy, fantasy and love story into an utterly singular package that's beholden to no rules but its own. As such, it demands complete surrender to a vision that veers from bewitching to irritating, sometimes within the same scene.

This farting corpse movie is also a buddy comedy that's sort of a love story, but what it's really about is our bodies, language, the life cycle of relationships, and how the essential ingredients of human connection have been corroded in the wake of the smartphone. Even as it invites snarky ridicule, Swiss Army Man dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.

An excruciatingly cute fantasy... The directors and writers offer a hint of an idea in Hank's display of a vision of responsible masculinity and the frustrations that it entails; yet they smother that idea in bland images, wheedling and sentimental performances, and banal emotions.

The conceit works, to a point, largely because Dano and Radcliffe are so open to the more tender aspects of Kwan and Scheinert's madness. And a sequence in which Hank re-creates for Manny the glorious, prosaic essence of riding a bus—complete with a rolling paper landscape pieced together from the pages of an old magazine Hank has found—is truly lovely.

Stretching one fairly great gag, a half-dead man whose bodily functions (passing gas, throwing up and becoming aroused), morph into useful survival tools for a half-living man who's struggling to find a reason to continue. Half acting exercise, there's Python-esque charm both in the comic but soulful performances as well as the hand-craftsmanship of the recycled garbage-made sets in the apocalyptic wilderness.

Vibrantly shot by cinematographer Larkin Seiple, "Swiss Army Man" is a deliriously kooky yet controlled experience. Jagged editing strategies maintain ambiguity about whether or not these events actually unfold as Hank witnesses them or simply exist in the confines of his deranged mind.