Swiss Army Man (Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan, 2016)

Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe star in a kookfest where the former, a loser stranded on an island and about to commit suicide finds the latter, a corpse, washed up on the beach. The corpse then proves of great value to him in getting off the island through the jet-powered flatulence generated as it decomposes and numerous other mechanical uses to allow him to survive through the wilderness on the mainland. Along the way, the corpse begins talking to him and what we then have is effectively a buddy movie. Taking place in the sadsack lead's head.
To say it's whimsical and puerile is self-evident, like Michel Gondry in collaboration with the Farrelly brothers, but what really characterises it is that undying tendency in some U.S. independent cinema to slap together as much incongruous nonsense as possible in the starry-eyed belief that beautiful life lessons will be revealed. As befits the American mentality, it's very much another religion, and when the keen-eyed amongst you spot the brief cameo at the end of Shane Carruth, the director of the even more irritating and ridiculously lauded Upstream Colour, probably one of the most egregious films this reviewer has ever endured, it reaffirms the existence of a cult of weirdness for its own sake masquerading as the virtues of diversity.

4/10