Swiss Army Man

Manny Decay

Swiss Army Man
2016 USA Directed by Daniels
UK cinema release print.

I got hooked into the idea of seeing Swiss Army Man right from the first time I saw the trailer a fair number of months ago on the internet. Unfortunately, not that many cinemas in London were showing it other than at silly times I couldn’t make it so, in the end, I took a shorter trek out to London Fields station and saw it at the Hackney Picture House which, I have to say, is a pretty nice cinema, despite the ticket prices. They also seem to be showing a load of movies my local Cineworld wouldn’t normally show so... think I’ll be going there a few more times a year now I know about it and how easy it is to get to.

I saw this film on a late Saturday morning performance and, even for a morning slot, this movie wasn’t exactly packed. In fact, there was only one other person in the screening I saw so I’m not sure what the box office returns on this one are going to look like.

Although the film at first appeared to be absolutely up my street, I did find the uncompromising vision of the two writer/directors,  Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert to be taking me just a little outside of my comfort zone at times... which is something I never thought I would ever hear myself saying about any movie which got a commercial release at the cinema. That being said, uncompromising vision is exactly what we need more of in today's bland and blasé cinematic world and so I can only applaud the cast and crew who worked on this.

The film centres on two main protagonists. One is Hank, played by Paul Dano, who starts the film stranded on a desert island and about to take his own life. However, just before he does the deed, he sees the corpse of Manny, the title character played by Daniel Radcliffe, washed up on the shore and, after a second false start at suicide, begins to bond with Manny when he uses the "is he really dead?" corpses prolifically natural gases to propel his body through water as he rides him like a speed boat. This gets him to land but still far away from civilisation and, after a while, Manny starts to manifest other super powers such as being a water dispenser for Hank and then, not so long after that, starts talking and recovering certain senses.

The film, then, becomes a road movie as the two try to find their way to civilisation. Of course, as Hank teaches the amnesiac, living dead corpse of Manny (who demonstrates many different uses and skills, just like a Swiss army knife, throughout the course of the picture) about the nature of life, the film becomes more about the examination of the road that brought Hank to the point where he was about to kill himself and looks at the way life in general impacts on people and leaves damage which not everyone sees is there.

It’s an inventive little story and filled with a lot of charm, that’s for sure. It gets very moving at times as the two discuss love and rejection and, ultimately, you wonder if the desert island at the start of the picture is not just a metaphor all along for Hank’s outlook on life and the place his mind has taken him to.

It’s also brilliantly shot with the directors finding some interesting framing and movement as the picture progresses... they’re also not afraid to focus your attention on something small and sometimes, that acts almost as a magnifying glass for the dialogue exchanges between Hank and Manny if you’re eyes are focused fixedly on one tiny part of the screen. One shot where a lot of forest is in close up, for example, blew me away as the two main protagonists are framed in the background through some trees and take up maybe just 5% of the screen. I don’t know how that shot will look to anyone watching on home video but at the cinema it was fantastic.

It goes without saying that a film which focuses primarily, for 99% of its running time, on just these two characters, needs actors who are really at the top of their craft and both Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe are more than up for the task... especially Radcliffe who has to be giving what is probably going to be the most unusual performance of his life... and any other actor’s, for that matter. I was already impressed by his performance in Victor Frankenstein (reviewed here) but what he does here is really amazing and, frankly, a brave move for any actor, not just somebody who is perhaps known to billions as the face of Harry Potter. There’s also a nice bit of supporting work from "my favourite actress who takes on cool horror and sci fi genre roles"... Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays the light at the end of the tunnel that keeps both characters going on their mission to return to civilisation as she becomes the not so healthy object of their collected desire. The last ten minutes or so also has cameos from composer Andy Hull, who provided the film's wonderful acappella score, and director Shane Carruth, who made two wonderful films called Primer and Upstream Colour (reviewed here).

It has to be said that, Swiss Army Man isn’t quite my cup of tea for personal reasons I won’t go into here but, having said that, you do have to admire the lack of explanation given about the title character and the single mindedness of the writers to craft their story their own way with what looks like little or no interference taken from the studios to be a more commercial product. I’m pretty sure a lot of audience members might be turned off by this movie in certain moments as it plays out and if I’d had seen this in a bigger collective audience than two people, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there would have been a number of walkouts like their were when it had its Sundance premier, from what I understand. But you know what? That’s okay. That’s what art is all about. This isn’t about number crunching pounds and dollars... this is about what all films should be about (and are in some ways but they are almost always severely compromised in this)... making something personal and creative which will make people think. As far as that’s concerned, this is a very successful film.

So... did I like Swiss Army Man. Well, yes and no. I think it’s a great film which I just didn’t happen to fully lock minds with but, obviously, I don’t see that as a failing of the film. I do know that it’s a film which does a very rare thing... shows you some stuff you are probably unlikely to have seen done on celluloid before (or even the horrible, modern day digital equivalent)... give you something new. As such, I think cinephiles around the world will probably dig this one a lot and, despite my own ambivalent reaction to it, I’d give it a hard recommend if you want to see something new which has been put together, no matter how vulgar in its wallowing in biological function, in as skillful a manner as you're likely to see. This is the kind of movie that cinema is all about... go see it.

Upstream Colour

The Pig Sleep

Upstream Colour
2013 USA
Directed by Shane Carruth
Metrodome Blu Ray Zone B 

Sort of Warning: This review may or may not contain spoilers... probably not because I suspect everyone is going to have their own interpretation and relation to the events that take place on screen... but still, putting this warning here just in case.

Upstream Colour is the second feature directed by Shane Carruth, who also writes, produces, does the cinematography, co-edits, stars in and composes the soundtrack for the film. Like his absolutely brilliant first movie Primer, it takes a science fiction base but grounds it absolutely in a very matter-of-fact contemporary setting, exploring a very basic premise but in the most clever, non-linear and almost impenetrable way.

The editing choices in this movie allow for some almost random placements which don’t adhere to a strictly linear presentation of the narrative (if you’re happy to call it a narrative) and which is best received by an audience member as a jumble of puzzle pieces which are there to decode but which will not necessarily lead to an ultimate rendering of a specifically correct conclusion. So while Primer shares a certain style and atmosphere with this movie, the place the content leads you to in this one is more along the lines of something like, for instance, Ben Wheatley’s brilliant Kill List (reviewed here), in terms of it not taking where you think the destination might be or, if you did get there first, taking you there for no specific reason.

However, I think in the case of Kill List, the clues and provocative moments are deliberately inserted to lead you to a place which has no real solution to it (and if I’m wrong about that, please tell me so) whereas I’m pretty sure this film has a very specific linear narrative hiding behind the frames, as it were, and which still holds up solidly, no matter what the common or popular interpretation of it is. For instance, I didn’t feel I was totally getting it so I read a synopsis of the film on Wikipedia afterwards and I have to say that, after reading that quite detailed synopsis... I ended up thinking, “Hey, they didn’t get it.” Like in the case where a dream sequence is mentioned to explain the presence of a specific character (played in the most passively haunting but somehow sinister way by Andrew Sensenig) who can be quite often seen watching other characters in the movie. I don’t think these were supposed to be dream sequences at all, to be honest. More like visual metaphors to define the presence of a person watching his pigs/experiments... if that makes any sense and, unless you’ve seen the movie, it almost certainly won’t.

Here’s what I could piece together.

A woman’s life is completely destroyed by a man who uses a specific kind of maggot, which he hides in a pill capsule and gives her as drugs. It has already been demonstrated that the maggot can form a very strong bond between minds which even allows two people to synchronise their movements via their thoughts. This maggot gets into Amy Seimetz character Kris and, once it’s in her system, the man has total hypnotic dominance over her mind. In the aftermath of her lengthy encounter as his slave, for all intents and purposes, she is left without money, a job and brutally scarred from when she was trying to get the maggot out of herself. In the middle of this all she is lured to a man to remove them who actually pulls it from her body and implants it into a pig. She then forgets everything and has to rebuild her ruined life with no knowledge of how she got like this.

A year later, Kris meets a man who seems to share a common empathy, even though they seem to have no interest in each other initially. The man is called Jeff and is played by Shane Carruth. As their relationship develops, certain things slowly come to light, as much as the editing style and placement of the narrative allows it to do so in your mind, and it becomes very clear that Kris is not the only person who has been through this devastating experience. What’s more, Jeff is also a victim of this process and it appears that maybe this is why the two of them seem so dependent on each other... something that gets more acute as they begin to share the same thoughts, emotions, physical feelings and even perceive childhood anecdotes of each other as their own. Things come to a head and, with the help of their shared identity with various pigs, orchids (I think, don’t ask) and the published musical compositions/sound scapes of the pig man, they end up taking their personal thread, joining it up with many other individuals (who presuambly form a connective identity), and basically take over the pig farming business by giving them a much better life.

If that sounds kinda skewed and unlikely then... yeah, it probably is. That’s my interpretation of the movie at my level (it’s true, I may be stupid) and I suspect everyone is going to come up with something different. Is the pig farmer genuinely observing the plight of the various victims of the process started by the man with the maggots, for instance? I don’t know but I’m willing to assume he’s tapping into their heads somehow and maybe shares a link from the same process as them... maybe that’s how Kris comes to get the upper hand near the end of the film and, in some ways, take over the process while bringing an end to the potential ruin and devastation of people’s lives.

What I can tell you for sure is that Upstream Colour is absolutely gripping throughout, just like Primer was, and it seems to me to be artistically successful in all that it tries to do. The performances are electrical and about as naturalistic as you can imagine. The cinematography is superb, giving us drab and neutral tones pitched against some beautiful, almost luminous colouring for certain sequences. The editing is both easy to follow... even if it does feel like Nicholas Roeg on acid, but without the fanfare... and that editing serves to provoke an atmosphere of puzzle solving which leads to your full engagement with the material on offer. The soundtrack, while a little clichéd, perhaps, for a film of this nature, serves the onslaught of images very well and never once outstays its welcome.

If I’d have seen this film at a cinema last year as I’d wanted to (Seriously UK film distributors... what happened to it? It didn’t play in my local Cineworld once!) then it would easily have made my top five movies from last year. As it happens, I’ll have to be content with saying that this movie is a very definite and hard recommend from me. Shane Carruth is an artistic force to be reckoned with (he’s even pretty watchable as an actor, as it happens) and this movie is a great work of art all lovers of cinema should see at least once in their lives. Very much a blu-ray I suspect I’ll be lending to a lot of people who wouldn’t normally see a movie like this and it’ll likely get a return visit from me sometime in the near future too. Take a look when you get the chance.