HIPPO

APPLE TV+

DIRECTOR MARK H. RAPAPORT

The American black comedy-drama film premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in 2023.

Hippo, a peculiar adolescent, and his Hungarian step-sister Buttercup struggle to come of age in late 1990s America, under the roof of a mother who has been institutionalized at least once.

“ 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. ”

"Hippo is meant to be a comedy — a dark, muted one with a couple of rowdy set pieces. And although Roberts, channeling frivolity, does score some funny lines, the movie most often reads as a hollow exercise in mannered filmmaking, orbiting an array of characters whose carefully curated quirks are flimsy enough to blow away with the wind."