Fried Barry Review

Spinning off from his 2017 short, Fried Barry is a one-off. South African writer-director Ryan Kruger’s feature debut is a mash-up of genres — science fiction, druggie drama, night-in-the-city-movie — that throws a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Thankfully most of it does. It might jump from set-piece to set-piece, with little story in between, but it has nutty energy, lo-fi invention and a hallucinatory quality all of its own.

The set-up is as simple as it is sordid. Walking the streets in a drug-fuelled haze, taciturn addict Barry (Gary Greene, a strong presence with an amazingly expressive face) is beamed up into an alien spaceship (cheap but fun effects) and, in a blitzkrieg of fast cut, madcap images, becomes a host for an alien who uses Barry’s body to go on a hedonistic odyssey through Cape Town nightlife. So the always silent Barry drifts through scuzzy bars, cuts some amazing shapes in a club, shags a clubber, is picked up by a sex worker before ending up on the wrong side of town to become an unlikely saviour of some abducted kids. And we haven’t got to the hospital, the police interrogation, the asylum and the batshit crazy ending.

The picaresque journey lacks narrative oomph and, in many ways, any over-arching point, but Kruger keeps things lively with body horror (a baby born moments after sex), a chainsaw fight, Superman-esque flying sequences and perhaps the most wince-worthy scene of DIY dentistry since Marathon Man. There’s a playfulness in the filmmaking too from the writer-director’s opening credit — ‘A Ryan Kruger Thing’ — to the faux introduction, shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio warning about “explicit language, nudity, and strong scenes of high-impact sexual violence.” Dotted around the film are simpler exchanges — one about why cartoon characters wear gloves, another centred on dented cans in grocery stores — that suggest, if he tires of the fantastical and depraved, Kruger has a career in more relatable human comedy. Either way he is a talent to watch.