‘Hippo’: Fantasia Review

Dir: Mark H. Rapaport. US. 2023. 100mins

Hippo (played by co-writer Kimball Farley), a surly 19-year-old narcissist, lives with his impassive adopted Hungarian sister Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger) in unhealthy isolation in late 1990s America. Both homeschooled by an eccentric and disengaged mother, Ethel (Eliza Roberts) – who lectures them on alien visitation but avoids tackling sex education – they have a skewed perception of the world. A loose interpretation of the myth of Hippolytus, this feature debut from Mark H. Rapaport (a producer of and performer in 2021’s The Scary Of Sixty-First) delivers plenty of cult-friendly grungy subversion, but does seem a little self-satisfied in its laboured perversity.

Leans heavily on the fact that most of the characters have a fairly tenuous grip on sanity

Rapaport, who also produced the fraternity horror The Pledge, opts for grainy, black-and-white cinematography; a choice that, along with Hippo’s shock of white-blond hair, evokes the early work of Jim Jarmusch. But both thematically – the film is a checklist of transgression, with everything from incest fantasies, cross-bow murders and water blasters filled with sperm – and in the somewhat rough-and-ready performance style, it has more in common with the early iconoclasm of John Waters. The film premieres at Fantasia and should find further audiences in midnight strands and other non-mainstream events. It may, however, struggle to break out from this fairly niche audience.

A dense narration, delivered with lashings of arch irony by Eric Roberts, fills us in on the background to this unconventional family unit. Hippo, (whose real name is Adam) is the favoured child – a status that has inflated his already robust sense of self-importance. In the absence of a father figure, Hippo has looked for guidance within the computer games that consume his every waking moment. He found a role model in an inscrutable, faintly malevolent game character, who lurks on the sidelines wearing shades and a black suit.

Buttercup, meanwhilte, dreams of conceiving a child with her brother; for some reason linked, we are told, to her Catholic childhood in Hungary. Their mother’s belated attempts at instruction in the facts of life only serve to complicate matters, with Hippo somehow convinced that he is a living God, and that his ejaculate is an acidic super weapon that can be used in defence against alien invaders. Mixed messaging on the sex ed, evidently.

Having given up, temporarily at least, on seducing her brother, Buttercup scours Craigslist for potential sexual partners, settling on the singularly unsavoury Darwin (Jesse Pimentel). Their first date is a family dinner, with the hostile Hippo glowering over his Gameboy, and Ethel fluttering, flirting, and sinking the best part of a bottle of red wine. The date is not a success, in that it comes with a body count. It is then that things start to get really weird.

There’s something of Dogtooth’s self-contained perversion of reality in this film but, while that film at least came with a kind of twisted internal logic, Hippo leans heavily on the fact that most of the characters have a fairly tenuous grip on sanity. Ultimately, a film that focuses on the delusional acts of delusional people gives us very little in the way of satisfying storytelling, instead veering rather too close to freak-show territory.