It’s a bold strategy, especially today, to go courting favor for a reactionary, conspiracy-minded, sexually repressed young man. Set aside the recent Presidential election results, which have once again foregrounded the implications of catering to a demographic that falsely believes the world is out to get them – Mark H. Rapaport’s new film, Hippo, is still a provocative piece.
Hippo is the story of two siblings – a son, Hippo (Kimball Farley), and adopted daughter, Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger) – and their alien conspiracy-addled mother Ethel (Eliza Roberts), living an isolated, repressed life in the middle of nowhere. If it weren’t for the tragic undercurrent of innocence flowing beneath his demeanor, one might ungenerously label Hippo as an incel, but the term doesn’t quite fit his unfortunate blend of repression and anger. His mother Ethel carefully maintains that innocence, and even curates it, by accommodating his penchant for violence at the expense of a sexual education. The result is a wildly misinformed worldview, an inflated ego, and fear of his own sexual “power” all generated by an unhealthy relationship with inconsistently monitored internet access.
Buttercup has her own issues, too. A Hungarian adoptee, she loves classical music, is a devout Catholic, and wants more than anything to be a mother. In fact, she prays for a child every night before bed, and spends most of the film devising various plots to get one. Thanks to her sheltered but (in contrast to Hippo’s) passive upbringing, all her plans range from ill-advised (she wants Hippo to impregnate her, and is perhaps even in love with him) to downright dangerous, like when she invites a stranger from Craigslist to the family house, only to discover, thanks to Hippo’s warped paternalism, that he’s a registered sex offender taking advantage of Pennsylvania’s permissive age of consent laws. That unfortunate date ends with more than one death, and triggers the precipitous spiral in Hippo’s psyche that transforms his misguided innocence into entrenched paranoia.
Rapaport’s story has all the bearings of heightened drama, but he’s executed it with a paradoxically twisted and warm comedic sensibility. The paradoxes continue in the film’s narration by Eric Roberts, which offers the viewer an objective yet compassionate view into the characters’ inner worlds. It’s a difficult strategy to pull off, and the result is a mood not unlike one might find after putting an early Lanthimos film into a blender with F. Murray Abraham’s narration from The Grand Budapest Hotel.
There’s more than a suggestion that the source of the family’s problems is the absence of a father figure. Hippo and Buttercup believe theirs to be dead (the film opens on a shot of his grave in their backyard), though a revelatory twist late in the film complicates matters. What we’re left with after a fantastical and violent climax involving ketchup, super soakers, an alien invasion, is new life. Rapaport may look at the state of the world through apathetic eyes, but he reserves grace for his characters, despite, and perhaps in spite of, their flaws.
DIRECTOR: Mark H. Rapaport; CAST: Kimball Farley, Lilia Kizlinger, Eliza Roberts, Eric Roberts; DISTRIBUTOR: Kinematics; IN THEATERS: November 8; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
Comments are closed.