“It would be good for you to socialize with someone. Even the pedophiles!”
Such is the timeless maternal advice that Ethel (Eliza Roberts) offers her stunted adolescent son, known only as Hippo (Kimball Farley), with the hopes of getting him out of the house for a few hours. The unremarkable young man is typically laser-focused on playing Nintendo 64, masturbating against his own stuffed hippopotamus, and drinking milk that he despises because he values bone density above all else. It’s the kind of reclusive existence that causes even his legal guardian to wonder if being molested would be that much of a social downgrade.
But protecting her kids from pedophiles has never been Ethel’s strong suit. The time that she devotes to discussing hypothetical pedophiles at the local pool would be far better spent looking into the very real pedophile that her stepdaughter has invited into their home. The 17-year-old Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger) is a Catholic Hungarian immigrant whose cluelessness about sex leaves her ill-equipped to deal with the biological urges that have begun to consume her waking thoughts. With her stepbrother refusing her requests to impregnate her, she decides to invite Darwin (Jesse Pimental), a Craigslist creeper who can spout off a million technical reasons why his actions never quite cross the threshold of statutory rape, to do the deed. But first, Darwin has to join them for an awkward family dinner in which he complains that he “should have stopped at my neighborhood Mickey D’s” before his molestation appointment and laments that he never had the chance to dabble in sibling incest because he grew up as an only child.
If you’ve read this far without slamming your laptop shut in disgust, allow me to encourage you to check out Mark H. Rapaport’s debut feature, “Hippo.” Quite possibly the darkest comedy released in 2024, it also deserves to be in the conversation for the year’s funniest film. Blending Middle American weirdness with sexual excess in a way that evokes a version of “Napoleon Dynamite” directed by Peter Greenaway, the hangout movie is so dryly funny and precise in its construction that it’s easy to forget what a grotesque situation you’re laughing at.
“Hippo” takes place in an unspecified year in the 1990s, a simpler time when rudimentary technology still made sexual ignorance possible. No matter how much Hippo and Buttercup might want to learn about the nuances of fornication, the state-of-the-art porn blocker that Ethel installs on the family computer burns their Library of Alexandria. He’s content to channel his latent horniness into video games, insisting that he learned everything there is about sex once he realized that the act consists of a man and woman lying naked next to each other and letting their essences mingle while asleep. But she is determined to follow her curiosities to their darkest possible endpoints.
It’s hard to call their existence blissful, but it’s certainly preferable to the Pandora’s Box of incest, murder, and other depravities they open when Buttercup bites the metaphorical apple and invites sex into their home. The film should have been called “Buttercup,” as Kizlinger’s character incites all the meaningful dramatic action and enjoys the most satisfying arc. Her take on the Hungarian teenager is hilarious and tragic, constantly following her desires to horrifying ends that could have been easily avoided if someone had simply taken the time to give her The Talk. Farley’s Hippo serves as a perfect foil, wildly apathetic about anything except gaming and protein while his sister endures a life-defining crisis of conscience before his eyes.
The sad state of affairs is wrapped up in a fairytale-esque package, with an unseen narrator (Eric Roberts), describing Hippo and Buttercup’s salacious inner monologues with all the eloquence of Hans Christian Andersen. The striking black-and-white images from cinematographer William Tracy Babcock are composed with Baroque precision, falling over each other so methodically that the sinfulness on screen often seems downright beautiful. It’s all scored by the classical music that Buttercup previously enjoyed before her sexual awakening.
The formality of the filmmaking juxtaposes beautifully against the crassness of the subject matter, immersing us in an environment that feels borderline dreamlike until we’re woken up by a sex offender telling a teenager, “I bet your thighs are insane” over a landline. Rapaport and Farley’s script turns the speech patterns of amoral idiots into a science, relying on perfectly placed filler words and profanities to wrap horrible ideas in hilarious sentences. Debates about the morality of inbreeding are woven so seamlessly between discussions about whether mustard is simply adult ketchup that there’s never a moment to pause to raise a moral objection.
Pairing literary allusions to the Bible and Greek mythology with prose that could be ripped out of “I Think You Should Leave,” “Hippo” is a singular experience that suggests Rapaport has a promising career ahead of him. The film suggests that, for all our high-minded cultural pursuits, we’re ultimately at the mercy of our own bodily functions and biological urges. All our creative endeavors and esoteric thoughts are merely rationalizations for things that nature wanted us to do anyway. Its essence can be summarized by a terse eulogy that’s offered to a certain murder victim: “He’ll go out of this world the same way he came in: forgotten and covered in his paternal goo.”
Grade: B+
A Kinematics release, “Hippo” opens in select theaters on Friday, November 8.
