Adam, sorry, the eponymous Hippo (Kimball Farley), is a character plucked straight out of a Tom Green universe. He’s nineteen and he doesn’t have a job. He ludicrously believes himself to be a god-king among mortals. Hippo believes that the N64 action adventure game Body Harvest is a training mission for his real calling: fighting a galactic war against an impending alien invasion. He does heinous, borderline psychopathic things like mix Mountain Dew with cold milk.

Hippo is simultaneously the funniest film Fantasia 2023 and the scariest. It’s the funniest because Hippo is absolutely a real person, and it’s the scariest because Hippo is absolutely a real person. There’s a whole sub generation of white men who grew up playing too many videos games with delusions of grandeur likely fed to them by mollycoddling parents. Here, Hippo’s mother (Eliza Roberts, Kicking and Screaming) is the source of his perverted man-child state. She dotes on him while largely ignoring the needs of his Hungarian step-sibling Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger).

Director Mark H. Rapaport’s feature debut largely defies categorization, although to take my best stab at it, it’s kind of akin to a version of Todd Solondz’s take on Freddy Got Fingered. Even then, I don’t think that really gets at what the film is. At its core, Hippo is singular. The film does two things impeccably. One is its use of black and white cinematography to accentuate the feeling of strange home videos. In doing so, Rapaport is able to build a piece that contains a pointed sense of nostalgia. This is a text that lives and breathes the early 2000s. It’s an impressive period piece. I liked this quite a bit. A lot of people will hate it. I have no idea how to tell you which camp you’ll fit into.