It's doubtful that an odder film than Swiss Army Man will get a cinema release this year. Universally referred to as "the farting corpse movie", it stars indie hero Paul Dano as a man seemingly marooned on a desert island and Daniel "Harry Potter" Radcliffe as the corpse who washes ashore to keep him company.
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It opens as Dano's Hank is about to end it all with the aid of a tree branch, some frayed rope and a small esky. He's starving but, more importantly, he's been driven mad by his loneliness. He just wants some company. Enter Manny (Radcliffe), the flatulent corpse.
Manny has the gift of the gas: his farts turn him into a jet ski, a fire starter, a rock-spitting cannon. His erect penis seems to know the way home. Press his chest and he produces water. Eventually, he even learns to talk. He's an all-purpose survival tool, the human equivalent of that little red Victorinox knife – albeit a dead one.
The brainchild of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a US writer-director duo known collectively as Daniels, Swiss Army Man debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the directing award. The judges called it "a remarkable film that brims with creativity, humour and deft insight". Yet it also swiftly garnered a reputation for prompting mass walkouts from disgusted audience members.
"That's total bullshit," says Dano of the widely reported claims that people fled en masse. "It was a 1200-seat theatre at the Sundance premiere, there were like 40 people standing because it was oversold, and a few people walked out. I guess it was the first thing that was tweeted, or something, so the first story that went up was about that and it just created a narrative of its own."
In a way, he thinks that early wave of bad press did the film a favour because "at that first screening people thought they were turning up to see a potential Oscar drama – they had no clue what they were about to see, and that was part of the fun". When word got out, "people started to know what the movie was".
Well, sort of.
Exactly what Swiss Army Man is about is open to debate. Is it a juvenile fart joke extended over the course of 97 minutes, or is it a deeply original take on the human impulse to "only connect", as EM Forster so succinctly put it in Howard's End?
Or is it, maybe, both?
Hank (Paul Dano) tries to get a response from the corpse he calls Manny (Daniel Radcliffe).
"For me, the film is about how shame prevents us from love, and from being ourselves," Dano continues. "Even though the film is set in the wilderness and could be set at any time almost, it's a very now film. It's about a person who is extremely disconnected from the world even though we're 'connecting' in so many ways. It's about loneliness and finding true connection, and what that gives us."
There's no doubt, though, that Daniels' debut feature sits on a continuum with their award-winning video and commercial work, where an obsession with the body in all its prurience is amply evident. But it's equally clear that Swiss Army Man is striving for something deeper, albeit by taking the most unlikely route to get there.
"It's impossible to give an elevator pitch for this film," says Dano, "but my favourite description is what the directors said to me when they first talked to me about it. They said they wanted to make a film where the first fart makes you laugh and the last fart makes you cry. I always thought if we could do that it would be the greatest film ever."
Not everyone will agree, but I reckon they come within a squeak of getting there.
Swiss Army Man is now screening.
