Bubble & Squeak Belabors Its Gag to the Point of Anti-Comedy

There’s something admirably gonzo about conceiving a feature film comedy that intends to center itself entirely around endless iterations and permutations of a single joke. One can only imagine that writer-director Evan Twohy knew that this is what he was getting into when he sketched out the newly Sundance-premiered Bubble & Squeak, an absurdist and highly stylized indie comedy revolving entirely around the cruciferous vegetable known as cabbage. Such a narrow purview for comedy and plot–although the film’s true basis is as a deconstruction of marriage and mismatched relationships–was always going to be a big swing. And sadly for Bubble & Squeak, that swing is for the most part a miss of impressively grand dimensions. Despite an incredibly talented cast of top-tier comedy talent, the film fails to establish a cohesive comedic tone, becoming only more unmoored when it reaches for unearned emotional profundity later on. If anyone remembers Bubble & Squeak in the years to come, it will no doubt be for the fact that it contains more utterances of the word “cabbage” than possibly every cumulative feature film to date in the history of cinema.

Declan (Himesh Patel) and Delores (Sarah Goldberg) are American newlyweds who have just arrived for a budget-conscious honeymoon in some kind of anonymous, Slavic-coded country in southeastern Europe, when they are detained by the country’s ominous, KGB-coded secret police. Following a past war in the country, in which the only food available for consumption was cabbage, the nation has built up such a deep-seated cultural hatred and trauma surrounding the vegetable that they have subsequently been banned, on penalty of death. And that’s not great news for Declan and Delores, given that she (for mysterious reasons) has about three dozen of them haphazardly stuffed into her pants, where they’re quite visibly threatening to burst free at any moment. This is the primary gag of Bubble & Squeak, and you’d better get comfortable with it: Delores has cabbages in her trousers, and you are going to hear about it. What follows is a farcical escape comedy, in which the mismatched husband and wife abscond into the woods and attempt to leave the country, while pursued by virulently cabbage-hating law enforcement.

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The first thing one will immediately pick up on in Bubble & Squeak is its uniquely stilted, formal dialogue, especially when it comes to exchanges between milquetoast android Declan (forever quoting from the tourism pamphlet like a Boy Scout) and more optimistic, open-to-experience Delores. Some reviewers have compared the tone this creates to a Wes Anderson homage, and although Twohy is certainly pulling from that well in terms of aesthetics–the pastel colored secret police, the quirky forthrightness of communication, the central visual framing and depiction of cartoonish bureaucracy–the actual dialogue seems more inspired to me by the sensibilities of two Rileys. That would be Boots Riley of Sorry To Bother You and especially Riley Stearns of films such as The Art of Self-Defense and Dual. The latter makes extensive use of non-naturalistic dialogue to suggest worlds that have been stripped of individualism, empathy and human warmth and compassion. In Bubble & Squeak, though, a similar affectation serves a far less obvious purpose–the film doesn’t seem to have a grip on how some of its creative choices are meant to serve any purpose as simple as “getting a laugh.” Unless, of course, Twohy simply believes that having a character speak with unrealistic formality is itself inherently a laugh riot.

This makes for an awkward aspect of Bubble & Squeak to judge, as the stilted interactions in its script are all quite clearly intentional–nothing here is really strange by accident. And comedy, of course, is highly subjective. But even if you can attune yourself to the particular wavelength of the back-and-forth patter, it still feels like far too many of its performers are being poorly utilized or given nothing to work with. At the top of this pile is the beloved Matt Berry, playing a commandant border agent named Shazbor, about whom we hear much but experience almost nothing. Employing a soft-spoken accent that sounds like it’s attempting to channel Christoph Waltz but instead landing in the neighborhood of Werner Herzog, Berry’s character manages what is quite nearly a net-zero contribution to the story and the film–I would not have thought it was possible for the actor so scintillating in the likes of What We Do in the Shadows to be given a role so stripped of any presence or humor. One wonders if Bubble & Squeak would have been better served by simply continuing on with the scar-faced, inexplicably Russian-accented character played by Steven Yeun in its opening moments as its primary antagonist, as he inhabits the character considerably more fully, but instead he falls out of the film as soon as he’s introduced. All the performers are clearly giving exactly what they were asked for; the question is more why they were asked to remain on such an alien wavelength.

What we’re left with is an ambling set of interactions, a committed trek through the woods with our pair of newlyweds as the stressful circumstances of being on the run–and endless talk of cabbage–tests their marriage and sends them down increasingly philosophical rabbit holes. They meet such luminaries as a suspicious child who can sniff out cabbages; a duplicitous cabbage smuggler in a bear costume played by a shredded Dave Franco; a railroad attendee who informs them that no trains will be leaving for the next month in accordance with the country’s 30-day festival devoted to hating on cabbages. It’s a bit like bearing witness to the water cycle of a joke–it belabors its laughs until they’re dead, and then alive again, and then asinine, and then almost hilarious. Any excerpted, five minute segment of Bubble & Squeak can be fascinatingly weird and engaging in its off-kilter energy, but taken as a marathon of a whole, it becomes confounding that so much devotion was displayed to the exercise. It’s an 8-minute short film that somehow became a 95-minute feature.

Despite it all, there are throwaway moments of Bubble & Squeak that will likely inspire random, stifled laughs in those with the attention span to get to them, petty relationship grievances given voice such as “You overwater my succulents!” But each of those moments is surrounded by so much esoteric anti-comedy–like Goldberg going on an absurdly long ramble about a hypothetical, turkey-shaped cake as the two tromp through the woods–that it feels like the audience is swimming long stretches under ice, looking for air pockets to steal the next breath. In the end, we’re left drowning in a sea of fleshy, green cabbage.

Director: Evan Twohy
Writer: Evan Twohy
Stars: Sarah Goldberg, Himesh Patel, Matt Berry, Steven Yeun, Dave Franco
Release date: Jan. 24, 2025 (Sundance Film Festival)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.