Hank, stranded on an island, wants to hang himself under a cliff, but is interrupted when a corpse of a man washes ashore. Naming the corpse Manny, Hank uses it as a ship and sails back to mainland using Manny's fart as propulsion. Hank carries Manny through a forest, searching for the nearest city, and imagines that Manny has conversations with him. Hanks tells him how his mother died and how he always met a woman in the bus, Sarah, but was scared to approach her. He even dresses up as Sarah to teach Manny how to talk to women. A bear attacks and injures Hank's leg, but Manny's farting combined with fire causes an explosion that scares the animal away. Manny carries Hank to Sarah's house, finding out she is married and has a daughter. When a TV reporter wants to interview him, Hank carries Manny back to the ocean, where the corpse swims away.
"Weekend at Bernie's" meets "Cast Away"—the plot outline of the feature length debut film by the Daniels sounds like utter nonsense and the dumbest thing ever on paper, but the directors' trademark in which they manage to use the most preposterous allegories and symbols to reach the heights of wisdom, humanity, philosophical contemplations and truths about life is already palpable in this edition, which will get even more refined in their later films. The viewers need to accept the most insane ideas in the first half in order to get to the emotional finale where a lot of things is amended and justified in the second half. This is one of the only movies in existence where you begin with a cringe at a corpse farting and end up almost crying in the touching end. How did the Daniels do it? By presenting a very abstract, but still recognizable story about loneliness. The corpse Manny (the unofficial "third Daniel", Daniel Radcliffe) serves as a psychological crutch to help the hero Hank understand that he derseves to live. Hank starts out trying to commit suicide, a person who feels ugly, insignificant and depressed, but ends up as someone who is healed by finding a new perspective in life. 95% of the film is just the interaction between Hank and Manny, as Hank even imagines that he is talking with Manny, to show what a mental trap loneliness can be. Despite some clumsy solutions, including moments that don't even attempt to be logical (exploding farting catapulting Manny flying), the funny dialogues charm ("I'm scared of whatever took that poop." - "But why?" - "Because only huge, scary things take poops that big." - "So what? Everything poops." - "Yes, but if it finds *us*, it will eat *us* and push us out its butt and turn *us* into poop"), and even reach that impossible dramatic turn which nobody saw coming in the end ("Maybe we're all just ugly, dying sacks of shit, and maybe all it'll take is *one* person to just be okay with that, and then the whole world will be dancing and singing and farting, and everyone will feel a little bit less alone"), all aligning into a movie that is its very own thing, and that's something that was lost in the formulaic-schematic modern cinema.
Grade:++
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