Film

Swiss Army Man

Name: Swiss Army Man
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance, Fantasy, Adventure
Released: 2016
Cast: Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Antonia Ribero, Timothy Eulich

A talking, farting corpse becomes Hank's Swiss Army knife of a survival tool and best friend in this deranged, oddly tender debut from the Daniels. It swings from gross-out slapstick to genuine grief about loneliness and shame within the same scene. Funny, strange, and unexpectedly moving — not for anyone allergic to whimsy, bodily fluids, or films that refuse to explain themselves.

TMDb rating

6.9

If you liked this

Everything Everywhere All at Once2022

From the same demented, big-hearted minds behind Swiss Army Man, this multiverse epic scales up their belief that the dumbest possible idea can carry the deepest feeling, with hot-dog fingers standing in for farting corpses.

But Three hours of interdimensional bureaucracy and googly eyes is a lot to ask if one talking corpse felt like plenty of absurdity already.

Everything Everywhere All at Once poster

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind2004

Kaufman and Gondry turn heartbreak into a literal, crumbling landscape, using a science-fiction gimmick to smuggle in something painfully sincere — the exact trick Swiss Army Man performs with an impossible premise of its own.

But It's sadder and quieter than the poster suggests, and the fractured structure asks you to piece a relationship's ending together before its beginning.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind poster

The Lobster2015

Yorgos Lanthimos imagines single people being turned into animals if they don't couple up, delivering deadpan absurdist comedy about loneliness and conformity that's every bit as strange as a corpse teaching a man to live.

But The performances are deliberately flat and robotic, which is the point, but it can feel cold if you want warmth over irony.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Harold and Maude1971

Both films use a taboo, uncomfortable relationship — a corpse, a decades-apart romance — as the unlikely engine that teaches a checked-out, half-suicidal man how to actually want to live.

A death-obsessed young man falls for an eighty-year-old free spirit in this 1971 cult classic, using dark comedy about mortality to argue, decades early, that embracing life's absurdity is the only way through grief.

But Its central romance was scandalous then and still makes some viewers deeply uncomfortable, whatever tenderness the film insists is underneath.

Lars and the Real Girl2007

A lonely man falls for a sex doll and his small town gently plays along — the same premise as Swiss Army Man's inanimate companion, but played for aching sincerity rather than gross-out comedy.

But It's slow and quiet where Swiss Army Man is manic; come for jokes and you'll get melancholy instead.

Being John Malkovich1999

Charlie Kaufman's breakout has a premise as unhinged as a door into a celebrity's head, proving decades before Swiss Army Man that the weirdest idea in the room can double as the most honest one.

But It's dense with ideas about identity and control that reward patience more than laughs, and its cruelty runs colder than this film's tenderness.

Moon2009

Sam Rockwell talks to a version of himself on a lunar base in this small, aching two-hander, sharing Swiss Army Man's fascination with what total isolation does to a mind left alone too long.

But It trades whimsy for melancholy dread, with no comic relief cushioning the loneliness at its center.

Paddleton2019no page yet

Two isolated, odd-duck men take a road trip with an unspoken deadline hanging over them, finding the same tender absurdity in male friendship and mortality that powers Swiss Army Man, minus the fantasy.

But It's grounded and quiet rather than surreal, so anyone hoping for more magic-realist weirdness will find it comparatively ordinary.

Frank2014no page yet

Michael Fassbender wears a giant papier-mâché head for the entire film as an outsider musician, and the result is a strange, funny study of creativity and mental illness disguised as a band comedy.

But The tonal swing into real darkness in its final act catches a lot of people off guard after the comic setup.

Weekend at Bernie's1989no page yet

The most obvious ancestor of the dead-body-as-companion setup, this broad '80s comedy has none of Swiss Army Man's soul but all of its commitment to dragging a corpse through absurd situations.

But It's shallow, dated slapstick with zero emotional ambition — junk food next to this film's junk food with a philosophy degree.

Anomalisa2015

Both films use an artificial or dead body — puppet, corpse — as the literal object through which an isolated man confronts what he's lost and what real intimacy would even require.

Charlie Kaufman's stop-motion puppet film gives loneliness and disconnection an uncanny handmade body, with nearly every voice but the lead's coming from a single actor — a formal trick as strange and sad as anything in Swiss Army Man.

But It's slow and melancholic, and features an explicit puppet sex scene that has thrown off more than a few unsuspecting viewers.

Dick Johnson Is Dead2020

Where Swiss Army Man invents a fantastical corpse to process fear of death and disconnection, this documentary stages death rehearsals for real, using the same instinct — play as a way to survive grief — with no safety net of fiction.

Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson stages her own father's death in elaborate, playful fake scenarios to prepare for losing him for real — a documentary that finds the same collision of absurd comedy and unbearable grief Swiss Army Man plays as fantasy.

But There's no fictional distance here — this is real dementia, real mortality, and it lands very differently than a magic corpse ever could.