'Swiss Army Man': Sundance Review Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe star as, respectively, a suicidal castaway and his best friend, a flatulent corpse, in this surreal feature debut from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels. You wait ages for a movie with a good bear mauling, and two come along at once. Mere weeks after the opening of The Revenant, wacktacular curio Swiss Army Man premieres at Sundance, featuring a scene where Paul Dano (Love & Mercy) suffers an ursine attack. (The end credits reveal a real live bear was used at some point, which gives the film a bit of street-cred edge over Alejandro G. Inarritu’s all-CGI effort.) The mauling is immediately followed by a spectacular, pyrotechnic-gymnastic display by Daniel Radcliffe playing a revivified corpse with supernatural farting powers. The fact that this isn’t even the weirdest thing in the movie says a lot about this, by turns, enchanting, irritating, juvenile and yet oddly endearing feature debut from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a writing-directing duo who’ve adopted just “Daniels” as their professional moniker. Conventional industry wisdom would take one look at the film’s logline — a lonely castaway (Dano) finds help on the arduous trek back to civilization with help from a surprisingly useful dead body (Radcliffe) — and run a mile. But in an age when videos for fairly obscure hip-hop artists can go viral just on the strength of their outlandish promo films alone, as was the case with Daniels-directed video for DJ Snake & Lil Jon’s "Turn Down for What," anything can happen. Swiss Army Man will probably make very little money theatrically. But over the long haul, there will be plenty of punters willing to watch it on Netflix (lavishly name-checked here, perhaps not coincidentally) and other platforms just for the curiosity value of seeing a movie where Harry Potter’s penis becomes a divining rod. Paradoxically, the movie’s plot sounds worse — way worse — than it is when described secondhand. The story starts with Dano’s Hank trying to hang himself out of despair on a deserted island, when the washed up corpse (Radcliffe) distracts him with its copious and very noisy release of wind. On investigation, the gas excretion is so robust, the body can be used as a sort of human jet ski to transport Hank to a distant shore of land thick with redwood trees. (Humboldt in California served as a location, and viewers might speculate that the county’s most notorious cash crop may have served as inspiration for the film’s hallucinogenic imagery.) Hank decides that being dead is no reason to leave a helpful new friend behind and drags the body along with him on his journey inland. Before long, he discovers that the corpse can be pumped for a miraculous stream of drinkable water and it regains some limited movement and the power of speech, introducing itself as Manny, a man who has lost all memory of his past.
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