Saturday, December 10, 2016

Swiss Army Man

If you mashed-up Cast Away with Weekend at Bernie's it might look something like Swiss Army Man. Inexplicably, it's also one of the year's best love stories. Stranded in the wilderness, a suicidal man (Paul Dano) is given a reprieve when a dead body (Daniel Radcliffe) washes up on shore. Starved and lonely, Hank (Dano) immediately begins a friendship with Manny (Radcliffe) who not only soften's Hank's isolation but also proves quite adept at quite a number of useful skills which help keep Hank alive.

While the uses of Hank's body provide most of the film's humor (that and the best masturbation joke I've heard in some time), the extremes Hank goes to in order to explain the outside world and concepts like love are something right out of a Michel Gondry film. The movie by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert is oddly beautiful, ridiculous in the extreme, and impossible to forget.

[A24, Blu-ray $19.99, DVD $12.96]

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