‘Bubble & Squeak’ Review: A Wes Anderson Wannabe That Tastes Like Spoiled Cabbages [D] – Sundance Film Festival

Do you find cabbages inherently hilarious? Yes, everyone likes the cabbage merchant running gag in Avatar: The Last Airbender (say it with me: “MY CABBAGES!”), but would you really want to spend 96 minutes watching the same few jokes about cabbages repeated ad nauseam? If you answered “yes,” Bubble & Squeak might be the movie for you. Everyone else? Stay away.

The story for Evan Twohy’s directorial debut follows Declan (Himesh Patel, Yesterday) and Dolores (Sarah Goldberg, HBO’s Barry), a couple honeymooning in an unnamed Eastern European country where cabbages are banned. The older generation experienced extreme depression from having nothing to eat but cabbages back during the war, you see, so they never wanted to see another cabbage again. Smuggling cabbages into the country is punishable by torture and even death. This is bad news for Dolores, who, for reasons that are never explained, is hiding 39 cabbages in her pants.

I tried to keep track of how many times the words “cabbage” or “cabbages” were uttered in Bubble & Squeak; I lost count around 80 or so. Whenever this movie encounters a joke – and this is the sort of comedy where dryly saying the phrase “cabbages in my pants” counts as a joke – it repeats it as many times as it can. This would be annoying enough as a Saturday Night Live skit. It’s interminable as a full movie.

In 96 minutes, across seven chapters and an epilogue, I laughed just three times: once in Chapter 3 after the unexpected final lines of an intense cabbage-hating child, and a couple times in Chapter 4 when Dolores tries to show extra sensitivity towards the cabbage smuggler Norman (Dave Franco, also starring in another Sundance film, Together). There’s also some amusement to be found in hearing Matt Berry (FX’s What We Do in the Shadows), the guy you usually cast for his distinctive voice, doing his best impression of Werner Herzog, the other guy you cast for his very different distinctive voice, while playing the vicious customs officer Shazbor. Beyond that, there’s little enjoyment to be had here.

Thematically, all the cabbage silliness has little to do with anything except as an excuse plot to push Declan and Dolores into situations where they must confront the conflicts in their relationship and various anxieties around their new marriage (parenting, infidelity, disappointment, etc.). But the story is all too contrived to say much at all about these topics, the poor script betraying the efforts the lead actors put into trying to take their parts seriously. It never seems like this couple has any real feelings for one another and it doesn’t make much sense why they got married in the first place. Chapter 7 eventually arrives at an intriguing idea for how to combine the resolutions to the cabbage story and the marriage story, but the set-up for both stories being so weak means that this theoretically clever payoff has little impact beyond a slight reprieve from boredom.

After watching Bubble & Squeak, I feel like I owe somewhat of an apology to By Design, the other absurdist comedy I’ve reviewed at Sundance this year. Like Bubble & Squeak, I found By Design annoying and one-note, but at least it had a clear point of view. Its silly premise actually tied into its thematic concerns, and Amanda Kramer drew from a wide variety of artistic inspirations to create something stylistically distinctive.

Bubble & Squeak, on the other hand, isn’t even bad in original ways. Many indies over the years have been inspired by Wes Anderson, but Bubble & Squeak pushes this inspiration to the point where it starts to feel like one of the many AI-generated Wes Anderson “parody” videos polluting the internet.  Twohy’s first feature borrows all the stylistic signifiers – the symmetrical frames, the pastel costumes, the matter-of-fact deadpan dialogue – of America’s reigning auteur of twee. By the time this film arrives at “the church made entirely of hay,” the twee has become too much. The parts of the film’s directing style not taken from Anderson – the excess of fisheye lens shots, for instance – are taken from Yorgos Lanthimos.

As a fan of Wes Anderson films, Bubble & Squeak feels to me like what the people who hate Wes Anderson films must see when they watch one of them. It maximizes the quirky attitude while missing the cleverness and emotional substance that makes Anderson’s style work. I’m baffled to hear that Twohy spent 15 years working on this script. Surely a passion project like that would result in something with, well, passion? Unless, of course, his passion is for convincing actors to repeat the phrase “cabbages in my pants.” By that and only that very specific standard, the film is a success. Otherwise, these cabbages are spoiled.

Rating: D

This review is from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where Bubble & Squeak had its world premiere. The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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Reuben Baron

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