Warning: the following post contains third act SPOILERS for Swiss Army Man.

“Am I weird?”

That’s the question that a magical talking corpse called Manny asks a miserable loner named Hank in Swiss Army Man, some time after Hank has ridden Manny’s farts across the ocean to escape a desert island where both of them were stranded.

“Am I weird?”

That thought, that urge, that thing my body does. Do those things happen to other people too, or am I the only one?

“Am I weird?”

That’s the question Swiss Army Man sets out to explore. In perfect and excruciating detail. It breaks it open down to the atoms. And the answer is at once beautiful and terrifying.

In the opening shots of the film we see bits of trash floating across the ocean with messages scrawled them. A juice box with the words “Help me!” scratched into the sides bobs across the screen, followed by another longer message written on a slightly more complex vessel. Slowly the messages grow longer and more complex, and the trash flotilla grows in size and intricacy as well, until at last we see a model sailing ship fashioned out of garbage laden with more words than we can read before it sails out of our view.

These first shots serve a purpose in the story, but more importantly they’re a message to anyone who would sneer at “that farting corpse movie” with derision. They say, “Yes, this is trash, but it is also art, and it has something important to say.”

Finally we find the creator of the trash art himself, Hank (Paul Dano) in the process of hanging himself. He isn’t starving or in pain, he just desperately wants to escape the overwhelming monotony and loneliness of his island life. But just as he’s tightening the noose he sees something wash up on the shore in front of him. It’s a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe). A stinking, farting corpse. And soon Hank realizes that those farts are so powerful they can propel the corpse through the water with him riding on it like a jet ski.

This is less than ten minutes into the movie. It’s a warning to anyone who might have wandered in looking for Finding Dory, that they are watching the wrong movie.

Once Hank and the corpse reached the mainland they find themselves in a forest full of bits of garbage, but there’s still no help in sight, so Hank, starved for human connection, drags the corpse into the woods with him and finds shelter for the both of them. And then the corpse starts talking.

The corpse can’t remember anything about his life other than his name: Manny. He’s a blank slate. And so Hank takes it upon himself to tell Manny about the world, starting with the most fundamentally important thing a human can know: the theme to Jurassic Park.

Almost the entire second act of the film is comprised of Hank and Manny talking as they try to survive and escape the trash forest. At first their conversations cover the basics of life, both socially and biologically. In one particularly memorable moment Hank draws the children’s book Everybody Poops on the pages of a discarded Bible, with poop; it’s a gesture that gets at the heart of the film’s philosophy, a purposeful blurring of boundaries, debasing the sacred, elevating the profane.

Later when Manny gets an erection after seeing a swimsuit model in a magazine, Hank tells him about fantasies, fetishes and masturbation. Manny is so adorably innocent with his questions and Hank so gentle and earnest in his explanations that none of these explicit discussions feel awkward or unsettling, and the chemistry between Radcliffe and Dano in these scenes is perfect and endearing and funny. There’s something cathartic about hearing two people discussing things that people just don’t talk about so completely without artifice.

But then Manny catches a glimpse of a picture of a girl on Hank’s phone. In a moment of panic Hank tells Manny the phone is Manny’s, and so Manny starts to wonder what his connection with this mysterious girl must be. And Hank, inspired by his own mysterious connection to the girl, builds an elaborate fantasy for Manny, starting with a chance meeting on a bus, and extending forward into an imagined life together, lovingly crafting a fantasy world from the trash and detritus that surround them.

All of this is incredibly beautiful and funny and touching, crafted to give us a sense of wonder, to make us as truly joyful as these two lost souls are in their forest hideaway.

And then the third act comes crashing through that stained glass facade and lets us see the whole thing in the cold light of reality.

Eventually Hank and Manny return to civilization, emerging from the forest in the backyard of the woman from Hank’s phone (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Her name is Sarah. We see that she’s married; she has a kid. And as the events of the final act unfold we come to understand that Hank and Manny were never really lost at all. All of their adventures, all of their fantasies built out of trash, all of it had taken place in the woods just behind this woman’s house.

Our perspective shifts cataclysmically. The lovable duo we’ve followed for the whole movie suddenly appear as freaks and monsters. Hank is a deeply damaged man, both mentally and emotionally, stalking a woman who doesn’t even recognize him.

We should have seen it before. The signs were there all along. Hank tells Manny about creating a fantasy relationship with the women he fancies, and yet we know he’s unable to actually go up to her and speak to her. Hank has imprinted his own ideologies and understanding of the world onto Manny, and their fantasy recreations of what a date with Sarah might be like show Hank creating a version of this girl that is based on himself and his needs rather than anything the real human woman might be. Also, they literally use Manny’s boner as a compass to guide them through the forest.

Our assumption is, of course, that Manny and his magical farting abilities are nothing more than a hallucination, until the climactic closing shots of the film when Manny, returned to the sea, jet-farts away from the shore in full view of policemen and news crews with a huge smile on his face.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what that ending means in the context of the film. It seems so incongruous that many viewers insist it must still be part of Hank’s delusion. But I don’t think that’s how it’s meant to play.

Because it all goes back to that pivotal question: Am I weird?

And it all goes back to farts.

Hank tells Manny how people are ashamed of their farts. Even though everyone farts, they don’t like to talk about it or do it in front of their friends. Manny isn’t ashamed of his farts. He lets them out at will because he doesn’t know he’s supposed to be embarrassed. And that ends up saving Hank’s life. But Hank holds his farts in until no one is around, because he’s worried what other people will think if he farts in front of them. He’s afraid of what they’ll think of him, so he bottles up his farts inside of him.

But farts aren’t the only thing he’s been holding in.

He’s attracted to Sarah, and there’s nothing weird or unnatural about that. But he can’t express that attraction, can’t bring himself to talk to her, because he’s afraid that if he does she’ll reject him. So he bottles up that attraction, building it up in his mind into an obsession. He let something natural and healthy turn into something creepy and sick.

Hank isn’t crazy. His version of reality isn’t any different from ours, and the urges that drive him are common to everyone. We weren’t “tricked” into liking him. He’s a nice, funny, smart guy.

He’s weird, not because of how he feels, but because of what he has done with those feelings. He’s held them in, letting them build up and build up until he is on the brink of exploding, and all because he was worried about what someone else might think.

This is the message of Swiss Army Man: we’re all sacks of crap living in a world full of trash. We’re packed full of thoughts and feelings that other people might not appreciate, even though they’re packed some variation of those same thoughts and feelings. Those things don’t make us weird, even if sometimes they don’t smell very nice when we share them with other people. But if we keep them inside for too long they can turn into something dangerous.

The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) first feature film is a weird romp, that’s likely to be dismissed by a great many people based purely on it’s subject matter. But every moment, every line, every shot, every bit of music, has both thematic meaning and function within the film. It’s the best and maybe the most important film I’ve seen this year. And I’ll be very surprised if that changes.

