Hippo (Soho Horror Film Festival 2023)(Review)

The title character of Mark H. Rapaport’s debut film, played by the film’s co-writer Kimball Farley, is an amateur film-maker who, quoting Nikola Tesla, promises his audience “man-made horrors beyond your comprehension” – and the Soho Horror Festival seem to have agreed by hosting the film’s UK premiere. It’s no surprise as, for all Hippo is nobody’s idea of a conventional horror film, it has a surprisingly broad array of horror tones and types in its bloodstream: the outrageous, darkly funny horror of white-trash transgression; the gradual, character-driven descent into psychological horror; and the total horror of imagining Eric Roberts narrating your masturbation session.

Roberts’ arch voiceover is omnipresent during the film’s first half as it introduces us to Hippo and his strange, isolated family. It gives the movie an ironic, distanced quality that Rapaport and Farley use to push the character’s behaviour to extremes that would be hard to empathise with, if empathy was the goal. Which isn’t to say it’s heartless, but you’ll find the emotional connection sneaking up on you rather than grabbing you from the start as most films do. Hippo’s mother (played in a flat-out great performance by Roberts’ wife Eliza), left her husband after becoming convinced he was possessed by extra-terrestrials. She is so oblivious to anything outside her own paranormal fantasy that she doesn’t notice her adoptive daughter, Buttercup, becoming increasingly sexually fixated on Hippo. It’s basically Wes Anderson’s Bad Boy Bubby at this point – which promises many things, but relatability is surely not on the cards.

And then that relatability somehow manifests anyway. Hippo – whose name refers to the stuffed toy he uses as a masturbation aid – is ultimately a young man trying to figure himself out. He dyes his hair to match his favourite video character, and despite not initially reciprocating Buttercup’s affections, he becomes incredibly defensive when she starts dating a local creep whose enormous glasses make him look like Mark David Chapman. Every young person’s life is a quest for an authentic identity, and Hippo’s unusual upbringing doesn’t exempt him from that. He’s also given to speeches – somewhere between Nietszche and Ignatius J. Reilly – where he boasts of his individualism and self-sufficiency. These come across as completely ridiculous when set against the stifling, extremely controlled life he actually lives, but self-delusion is common amongst teenagers – I remember at that age thinking I could sing.

Hippo’s macho self-image, along with his belief in an imminent apocalypse, open up a reading of Hippo as a satire on male radicalisation in the age of online conspiracies. If this is the case, it’s a more subtle and original approach to addressing the Extremely Online world than The Scary of Sixty-First, which Rapaport produced. The Scary of Sixty-First was one of those films (like Sean Price Williams’s recent The Sweet East), that want to be seen as underground and transgressive, but can’t resist wrapping everything up in lustrous grainy retro-chic visuals. It’s as if the cinematography is there to remind you that these people aren’t real paranoid or extremists, but well-connected NY hipster celebrities slumming it.

Hippo is something else, and not just because it’s set in Pennsylvania. It’s shot in black and white, but somehow this feels different to the kind of black and white you see in Oscar-season films with historical settings. Rather than conferring high-mindedness, it makes the subject matter feel even more marginal, in line with eccentric turn-of-the-millennium monochrome works like Dark Days or Wisconsin Death Trip (the latter of which Hippo’s family could walk straight into without seeming out of place).

For all it doesn’t feel dated, I kept thinking of the 1990s during Hippo – and not just because Hippo and Buttercup’s mother is a believer in that ultimate ’90s fantasy of alien abduction. I’ve recently been reviewing The X-Files over on The Geek Show’s Patreon, and one element of that series which becomes more and more clear as time goes by is that it’s about the death of backwoods Americana. As the original run of the series ended, all those little American small towns were getting internet connections, and the kind of remoteness which breeds alien abductees and folkloric monsters ebbed away.

Except Hippo brings this sensibility into the modern age, and does so in a way which makes you wonder why we ever thought it was obsolete. Having an internet connection doesn’t make Hippo and Buttercup any less isolated as, if anything, the weird partial glimpses of life they get through the computer screen make them even more confused and frightened of the world outside their house. In the past, a film like this would play midnight-movie circuits, slowly gathering a cult following who would speculate on what it all meant, and who on Earth made it. The fact that I watched it on a screener link then Googled information about the director has not, somehow, defused the alien, enigmatic quality that makes it so compelling. It’s a film in the lineage of Harold and Maude, or The Cement Garden, or Donnie Darko – spiky little weird teen films for spiky little weird teens. We haven’t had one of those in a while, and once you see Hippo you’ll realise how much we’ve missed them.

Graham’s Archive – Hippo (2023)