Perhaps the first film where an alien ice mummy fails a breathalyzer test, Jesse Thomas Cook’s The Hyperborean aims for nothing less than the sort of self-consciously absurd fun that such an image suggests. Structured as a series of flashbacks, with corporate lawyers and investigators trying to piece together the events of a fateful family gathering, the film alternates between present-tense scenes of dialogue and moments that occurred earlier in the night. The owner of a whisky company gathers his family for a major product announcement — his team has discovered 170-year-old casks of whiskey frozen in the Arctic — and nothing goes quite as planned. Each of his kids, and their partners, is an exaggerated caricature of a type: the rich kid playacting as cowboy, the self-obsessed influencer, the hipster with a ridiculous vest and moustache who operates a fancy bar. With one partial exception, they’re all incompetent nepo babies fighting for their claim on the inheritance. It’s Succession as sci-fi-horror-comedy.
These characters are often on the border of being convincingly fun vs. emptily signifying a type. They work best, as does the film itself, in the moments of greatest activity, when the family fights among themselves or with a whiskey-drunk, laser-eyed ice mummy. The scenes of dialogue after the fact allow for an effective pacing strategy that alternates between hectic and calm and underscores the former, though those sequences don’t work as well in and of themselves. The cast and screenplay are much more successful at delivering humorous action than at finding the real personalities beneath these characters’ posturing, but for viewers primarily looking for the former, there is plenty to enjoy in The Hyperborean.
DIRECTOR: Jesse Thomas Cook; CAST: Liv Collins, Tony Burgess, Jessica Vano; DISTRIBUTOR: Freestyle Digital Media; STREAMING: July 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
