There is breathwork that sounds like climaxing and climaxing that sounds like breathwork. They cup each other’s crotches as grounding exercise. It’s a feat, then, that Herriman and Van Beek – alongside a sideshow of oddballs, including the Australian TikTok star Ian Zaro as a blustering but big-hearted foil to Bruno, and Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement as their fraudulent cult leader-cum-love guru called (of course) Bjorg – keep the foregone conclusion at bay, just long enough to indulge in a raft of slapstick antics. By the time they settle into the tantric rhythms of their orgiastic oasis, we can already see how this film might end: with the once-sheltered couple stripping away traumas and undergarments to reveal something feral and innate within themselves, to excavate the identities they’ve lost to the churn of domesticity.
So Bruno and Laura – stuffy and stiff – come to experience the ways of their free-wheeling, free-balling peers – stiffied and stuffed. The power of the hog … Jemaine Clement as Bjorg.
