Bubble & Squeak

After you've been with someone long enough, you might start to feel like you know everything there is to know about them. You can start to know how they feel in stressful situations, what they think about different people and places, even anticipate the kinds of jokes and stories they'll tell given certain social prompts. This kind of familiarity can often breed some level of boredom (or even contempt), but it's just something that happens when you spend most of your waking hours with the same person. All that being said, you will never completely know what is in the heart of your partner; they will always have certain dreams and desires that will be unknown to you. If someone hides enough of who they really are, you might even end up falling in love with only your idea of the person, which can only cause all kinds of problems in the future.

"Bubble & Squeak," the relentlessly quirky debut film from Evan Twohy premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, is about a married couple on a honeymoon who are already starting to realize they might not be right for each other. Unfortunately, those realizations (and any kind of pathos) are mostly unexplored and almost completely buried, as Twohy seems much more interested in creating an offbeat atmosphere that quickly wears out its welcome.

Declan (Himesh Patel) and Dolores (Sarah Goldberg) have just arrived in a fictional foreign country on their honeymoon, when they are detained in the airport under suspicion of smuggling cabbages into the country. The couple insists that there must be some kind of mistake, but their interrogator (Steven Yeun, only on screen for a few minutes) explains to them that cabbages are illegal in this country, and if they don't come clean, he will have no choice but to unleash the violent "bad cop" Shazbor (Matt Berry) to torture them. This opening scene is the best part of the movie, as the viewer has no idea what is going on, or why everyone is speaking in a stilted, deadpan manner. It all culminates in a hilariously effective camera-pan reveal that Dolores indeed has a ton of cabbages stuffed in her pants, and the couple eventually escapes out of a window, doggedly pursued by Shazbor and a group of officers.

On the run from there, Declan and Dolores run into a parade of goofy characters that each reveal differences in the perspectives of the newly-married couple. They briefly hide out at the home of a couple with a young boy, and discover differing views about the traditional lifestyle of settling down and having children. They come across a confident and sexy cabbage smuggler (Dave Franco) who seduces Dolores and ignites her desire for adventure, in opposition to Declan's more staid nature. Dolores is constantly trying to live in the moment while Declan can only obsess about returning home to his job so he can get a promotion. Their situation is entirely ridiculous and played for laughs, as they are facing execution if caught, but there is no sense of real danger since everyone is acting in a goofy monotone register. The humor often falls flat, as there's only so many times we can hear the words "cabbage" or have Declan speak to his wife using her first name over and over. The only gag that really worked for me was Matt Barry inexplicably playing the notorious Shazbor with a dead-on Werner Herzog impression.

Ultimately, the movie attempts to build to a moment of profound realization between the couple, but it falls flat not only because they are completely unbelievable as a couple in the first place, but because even the profound moment is stuck inside of yet another cabbage-related gag. Humor is subjective, of course, but there isn't enough variation on the theme to be truly effective here. The story moves along at a brisk pace and there are enough questions to hold your interest (why does Dolores have the cabbages in the first place? Why is Declan seemingly ignoring the fact that she clearly has them hidden in her pants?), but the answers are frustratingly ignored or hand-waved away, resulting in an unsatisfying ending on an emotional and storytelling level.

Due to its deadpan dialogue style, you might see this movie compared to the works of Wes Anderson or Yorgos Lanthimos, but those comparisons are incredibly surface level and mostly due to the mode of dialogue. Twohy generates a decent level of audience goodwill with a good start and some decent gags, but that rapidly deteriorates as it becomes apparent that the joke only has one note, and the couple's issues are so basic that it's astonishing they even got married in the first place.