Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Kimball Farley, Lilla Kizlinger, Eliza Roberts, Jesse Pimentel, Eric Roberts (narrator)
Intro:
The stark black-and-white photography and laidback performances can make fully grasping this film in all its exceeding absurdity a difficult ask, but there’s something about just how dedicated it is to being singularly strange and unapproachable that is gripping in its own way.
In the absence of their father, and with only the guidance of their UFO-obsessed mother (Eliza Roberts), adopted siblings Hippo (Kimball Farley, who co-wrote) and Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger) try to fill the void where their patriarch should be.
Hippo, an avid gamer and budding filmmaker, wiles away his days practising with his crossbow and preparing for an alien invasion. Buttercup, meanwhile, struggles with her adolescent sexual urges as she observes her chaotic older stepbrother with a mixture of cold distance and… burgeoning attraction.
Writer/director Mark H. Rapaport’s debut feature comes across as a direct challenge to the quirk-laden stereotypes of the American indie film scene (it’s executive produced by David Gordon Green, Jody Hill and Danny McBride). His depiction of an isolated and fractured nuclear family builds on the kind of surreal specifics found in the characters of Wes Anderson or early Linklater or even Larry Clark and Harmony Korine. But instead of presenting them as lighthearted weirdness, he illustrates the reality of these human oddities and the genuine terror that they must experience in the flesh. It’s a house with three people who consider themselves adults, but there are no grown-ups in this place, when they are desperately needed.
Hippo takes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, itself borne from the petri dish of American indie cinema and extrapolates that to cover all things that casual observers would have a shy giggle at… until they take into account the harsh reality of such things. It’s the difference between making fun of conspiracy theorists that you might find out in the wilds of the internet and being raised in one of their households. It all becomes less funny when it’s treated as hardened reality, along with all the adjacent considerations of one’s fellow man.
Not that the film is devoid of humour. As it digs deeper into its increasingly-buckwild narrative, and all the Freudian psychology it entails, the dynamic presented by the wildchild Hippo and the deadpan Buttercup offers many opportunities to take a step back and see them both as demented parodies of respective masculine and feminine ideals; the manchild who models himself and his lust for weapons after a character from the Nintendo 64 game Body Harvest, and a womanchild so intent on fulfilling her ‘traditional role’ that she invites over Darwin (Jesse Pimentel), who has memorised the age of consent in each U.S. state.
This is up there with Ari Aster’s The Strange Thing About the Johnsons in terms of nightmarish examples for why proper sex education is vital.
Much like the titular animal, Hippo takes something often mistaken as cute and innocuous and reveals the monstrous beast that it truly is. The stark black-and-white photography and chilled performances can make fully grasping this film in all its exceeding absurdity a difficult ask, but there’s something about just how dedicated it is to being singularly strange and unapproachable that is gripping in its own way.
Its influences stretch from Napoleon Dynamite to Dogtooth to Eraserhead, maybe even shades of Australia’s own Reflections in The Dust, and yet it’s difficult to consider this as anything other than its own perplexing creation. Understanding it comes second to the perverse comfort of knowing that something this bloody strange actually exists out there in the world. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
