Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is back from Park City, Utah, where he covered the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, but the fun isn’t over just yet. Keep it locked to our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
As I often say, comedy is inherently more subjective than drama, which is why it doesn’t win any awards (even when amazingly talented comic performers get nominated) and is absurdly complicated to criticize unless you’re roasting a stand-up on stage at the Comedy Mothership. I don’t envy Jason’s job in the slightest: That shit is hard, dogg. Hence the absurdly staggered reactions to Evan Twohy’s Bubble and Squeak coming out of Sundance, which hopes – no, prays – you’re game for the ridiculous journey you’re about to go on and that you have an audience that shares a similar sense of humor. I have no idea if you will find this funny, which makes it hard to recommend, but I had a good time with it. How much do you like cabbage and international smuggling?
That’s precisely what Bubble and Squeak – named for the cabbage-based leftover casserole equivalent they eat across the pond – is about. A pair of newlyweds, the buttoned-up Declan (Himesh Patel) and the dreamy-eyed Delores (Sarah Goldberg), find themselves caught in customs as they try to go on their honeymoon. It’s one of those fictional countries that’s a construct of silliness, much like Freedonia in Duck Soup, though it has an Eastern European flair this time, given that it was shot in Estonia. They’re soon interviewed by a border patrol agent (Steven Yuen), tasked with playing “good cop” with the couple. See, the police heard a rumor that some American tourists were walking around with cabbages in their pants, trying to smuggle them into their decidedly anti-Capitata group country (the bitter taste of a long-passed civil war ruined what once was a stable of their diet for an entire generation). If they don’t go ahead and sign a confession – in which one of them will be shot – he’s going to go get Shazbor (Matt Berry), who will slice off their fingertips until they admit to cabbage-smuggling.
Declan is (quite understandably) angered by all this and shows a surprisingly brave side of himself – he pulls a screwdriver out of his man-purse and breaks the lock on a window so that he and Delores can flee – but his wife doesn’t want to go. It becomes pretty clear why: her pants are full of cabbages, to the point that, later in their escape, Declan has to say that his wife has a bunch of “tumors” on her legs to avoid suspicion. Yet they go on the run regardless, with Shazbor and his merry gang of misfits pursuing them across the country. They bounce from circumstance to circumstance: there’s the cabbage-hating family that they have dinner with one night whose young son seems like a psychopath; then the bear-suit-wearing smuggler (Dave Franco) that they encounter in the woods; and the giant month-long anti-cabbage festival they stumble into while trying to get train tickets out of the country. But as they get further into their journey, the more they realize they might not be as compatible as they might seem – Delores wants to do exciting things with her life, and Declan, well, Declan’s just satisfied with a nice new lawn mower with a bigger bag.
So, again, your mileage may vary. One thing I am sure of is that the words “Wes Anderson” need to stop appearing in reviews of anything with a mildly quirky sensibility, regardless of whether the comparison is intended to be flattering or insulting. Absurdist comedy with pastoral European trappings isn’t just Anderson’s forte. Yet, he’s the one filmmaker we cite when confronted with something slightly exaggerated yet stately in its serious compositions surrounding silly material. Twohy’s approach to comedy aligns well with British humor (think Look Around You, The Mighty Boosh, or any non-Peep Show Mitchell and Webb). Still, this sensibility is typically reserved for a sketch or a half-hour episode, though it has often been successful on screen (just look at the films of Peter Strickland, for God’s sake), and there are plenty of moments in which it seems like it’ll wear out its welcome – the commitment to the conceit is all-encompassing, and you have to keep finding new ways to enjoy it to remain engaged.
Yet I liked the deadpan humor, for the most part, given that it’s performed by a wonderfully game cast. Patel and Goldberg are great opposites – you can see why they’re attracted to each other, even as they begin to realize how bad of an idea their pairing was – and they’re both lovely goofballs in the classic screwball tradition. The bit players often steal whatever scenes they’re in, with Yuen, Franco, and Berry being particular standouts. Yuen’s an Eastern European Hans Landa, with flairs of wit and ego in his gamesmanship approach to interrogation, while Franco’s ability to say the dumbest shit with a perfectly stoic attitude is always delightful, especially as he recounts his lengthy fight with the bear who wound up becoming his smuggling outfit. But it’s Berry, doing a lengthy riff on Werner Herzog, who is the most effective – his performance is so understated and amusing that I wound up desperately wishing he’d have his own half-hour cop show so he could riff more on the nature of humankind’s brutal and lonely existence. Add the strangely gorgeous setting to the mixture, and you have something aesthetically intriguing – a comedy with style, which is somehow seen as puffery.
Yet that’s the rub – aside from the “Wes Anderson” comparisons, I understand why someone might genuinely hate this movie. Some will find things to laugh at during nearly every minute of Bubble and Squeak’s 90-minute runtime; others will sit through what I can only imagine as a mind-numbing form of boring torture (see: the reactions to Dead Lover). Either you’re with it, or you’re not – just be prepared for a lot of cabbage and, potentially, a lot of good gags.