Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures— short films, music videos, commercials— that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other people’s bodies, Teddy bears dance to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot clothes from rifles onto fleeing nudists. Last year, their first feature-length project, “Swiss Army Man”—starring Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent talking corpse that befriends a castaway— premièred at Sundance, and left some viewers wondering if it was the strangest thing ever to be screened at the festival. The Times, deciding that the film was impossible to categorize, called it “weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented.”
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Daniels were notified by their production company,…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 30, 2017