Bubble & Squeak was the last film I watched at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, wrapping up nine days of screenings in Park City and Salt Lake City. Over that time, I cried (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Omaha), felt my heart melt (The Ballad of Wallis Island), got tense (Together, Rabbit Trap, The Thing with Feathers), and laughed (Oh, Hi, The Wedding Banquet). But while I saw a few duds among the 26 films before this one, none inflicted the worst possible cinematic experience: sheer, agonizing boredom. The kind that makes you check the time, wishing for the credits to roll. Thankfully, Bubble & Squeak is only 97 minutes, but somehow, it still felt interminable.
Writer-director Evan Twohy seems determined to test just how much mileage one single idea (I hesitate to even call it a joke) can sustain a feature-length film. The premise? A honeymooning couple (Himesh Patel and Sarah Goldberg) arrives in a small country where customs officials accuse them of smuggling cabbages. In an early scene, a mildly amusing interrogation with an officer (Steven Yeun) has them repeatedly denying any cabbage smuggling, despite smelling suspiciously like it. Then, when they escape, the camera finally pulls back to reveal the big gag: the wife has about 20 cabbages stuffed in her pants. Hilarious. From there, the movie becomes a repetitive cycle: the wife insists she isn’t smuggling cabbages (she very clearly is), they argue, and they evade authorities while meeting a series of eccentric side characters. The humor never escalates, the stakes remain nonexistent, and the film mistakes the mere mention of “cabbage” as inherently funny.
Twohy’s debut feels like an amateur imitation of Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos, borrowing their deadpan delivery and symmetrical framing but never understanding what makes those styles work. The film has no real rhythm to its humor, no clever wordplay, and no visual inventiveness. The movie’s one semi-passable scene involves Dave Franco, who at least seems to be in a much goofier (and much more fun) film. He plays a man in a bear costume who is also smuggling cabbages. But beyond that brief moment, we’re stuck with a pair of protagonists who have nothing interesting to say to each other. They bicker in the dullest ways imaginable, with jokes as lifeless as one of them casually mentioning they read about the American fur trade when the other falls asleep.
At some point, the film halfheartedly gestures at being about relationship incompatibility, but you’d have to squint really, really hard to see any actual development supporting that theme. The supposed emotional weight never lands, and by the time we reach the bafflingly executed finale, it’s unclear how we even got there. Bubble & Squeak proves that a quirky idea alone isn’t enough to sustain a film, nor is mimicking your inspirations without a grasp of their craft. In the end, it’s as stale and unappealing as the cabbages it fixates on.