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Film Featuring Daniel Radcliffe As A Farting Corpse Inspires Walkouts
Every film festival has that one movie that people walk out of en masse, and at this year's Sundance it's the one where Daniel Radcliffe plays a farting corpse. Yep.Swiss Army Man was one of the most talked-about films going into Sundance, and it stars Paul Dano as a Hank, a man stranded on an island who befriends Manny (Daniel Radcliffe), a washed-up corpse that possess special powers. A beautiful friendship springs up between the two and Hank puts Manny's abilities to use, such as turning him into a fart-powered speedboat, or using Manny's erection as a compass needle to find a way home.
"You just have to see it," Radcliffe told The Daily Beast. "It's profoundly profound and profoundly stupid at the same time, in a great way."
Swiss Army Man is directed by a duo known as the Daniels—Scheinert and Kwan—whose biggest claim to fame prior to turning Harry Potter into a flatulence-propelled watercraft was the music video for "Turn Down For What" (which has its own flavor of boner humor):
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They also directed a short, bizarre video about love and slowly getting sucked into your best friend's butt called Interesting Ball.
Wired calls Swiss Army Man "basically a 95-minute viral video." As you can imagine, the reaction has been quite polarizing, and up to 50 people were said to have walked out of the first screening at Sundance:
Counted at least 30 walkouts within first 30 mins of the unwatchable SWISS ARMY MAN before I bailed myself at 40-minute mark. DO NOT SEE IT.
— Jeff Sneider (@TheInSneider) January 22, 2016
If Gondry directed a castaway version of Weekend at Bernie's it might come close to the strangely confounding SWISS ARMY MAN.
— chris nashawaty (@ChrisNashawaty) January 23, 2016
"Originally, it was just a fart joke that Dan made to me," co-director Scheinert told the audience after the world premiere. "I think just along the way of kind of like joking about how man-riding-a-farting-corpse could be a feature, we stumbled upon something personal." So there you have it: the fart-corpse Sundance movie was a personal movie.
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