Swiss Army Man

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert put their first feature’s most repellent gag in the opening minutes and build the emotional line only once you accept it. People walked out of the 2016 Sundance premiere; Daniel Radcliffe said he liked being divisive. The pair took the festival’s U.S. Dramatic Directing Award. The Andy Hull and Robert McDowell score is the clearest decision. The directors banned instruments: sound had to come from a body or from nature, with real orchestration held for the final scene. The pieces were written so the actors could sing them on set; the album credits Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe as featured voices. It was finished four days before the premiere. The corpse is ridden like a jet ski, and that stretch was shot in pieces: a stunt performer on a towed dummy offshore for the wides, a dummy moulded from Radcliffe’s body with a compressed air line through it for the close ups, the actors together on calm water in between. Scheinert says cleaning a practical shot up afterwards is what makes it look like bad CG. A good fit if you want a score built without a single instrument, sung by the two men on screen. Not for you if you expect the bodily humour to stop after ten minutes; it runs throughout.