Every year at the Sundance Film Festival, filmmakers bring their off-the-beaten-path comedies that don’t feel like the conventional funny titles that we’re used to. This has led to plenty of modern comedy classics like Clerks, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Napoleon Dynamite, but it’s also seen some big swings that don’t quite connect. For example, who could forget last year’s Sasquatch Sunset, an ambitious but extremely strange comedy that had a non-verbal and unrecognizable Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough as a pair of bigfoots shitting and pissing all over the place for 90 minutes? In 2025, the honor of the festival’s biggest comedy swing and a miss comes in writer-director Evan Twohy’s Bubble & Squeak, a film with an incredible cast centered around… making jokes about cabbages. (The title refers to a classic English dish of cabbage and potato.)
What Is ‘Bubble & Squeak’ About?

Yes, that’s right, Bubble & Squeak is about cabbages. Everyone is obsessed with cabbages, the film is full of cabbage jokes, and even the big cathartic conclusion of the film centers around eating cabbages. Himesh Patel and Sarah Goldberg star as Declan and Delores, a newly married couple who have decided to go to an unnamed nation for their honeymoon, as Declan wanted to go somewhere off the beaten path. We meet Declan and Delores after they’ve been stopped at customs, where a customs agent, Bkofl (Steven Yeun), says they’ve heard of an American couple smuggling cabbages into the country through their pants.
This country is very anti-cabbage, as during a great war, all they had to eat was cabbages, so it’s now the last thing anyone wants in their country. The punishment for smuggling cabbages is fairly dire, leading to either death or severe beating that will probably result in death anyway. Bubble & Squeak’s biggest laugh comes in this opening scene, as the married couple listens in disbelief to this cabbage situation, only to reveal that Delores clearly has her pants stuffed with cabbages before they attempt to make a run for it.
Declan and Delores escape the customs office when Bokfl isn’t looking, and try to hide in the woods of this country where it’s almost always daylight. Along their journey, this newly married couple has to escape the grasp of Shazbor (Matt Berry, doing a Werner Herzog impression), who is tracking these two with his other agents, ready to beat these two with his rusty bat. They’ll run into other weird people, like Norman (Dave Franco), a cabbage smuggler who has taken to hiding inside a bear suit he made after killing said bear.
‘Bubble & Squeak’ Thinks Cabbages Are Way Funnier Than They Are

Image Via Sundance Film Festival

Bubble & Squeak is such a wild concept, following a cabbage-smuggling couple in a country that hates cabbages, that the absurdity alone makes it occasionally amusing. There’s almost a Monty Python sort of repetition to this one joke that makes it sometimes work, and there’s no way that the film doesn’t now hold the world record for most times a person says “cabbage.” It’s so ridiculous that it’s almost a funnier idea to explain to others than it is to watch play out for a feature-length film.
But Twohy’s screenplay is so wooden and odd that it means Declan and Delores never feel like actual people — which becomes an ever bigger problem in the third act when the film attempts to give them an emotional conclusion. These two feel like pawns in one big cabbage joke, and the way they talk throughout the film is so contrived and stiff that it can get exhausting pretty quickly. There are only so many times you can say the exact same joke with the exact same cadence and still have it be effective.

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Twohy is clearly trying to make the world of Bubble & Squeak and this fake country feel ludicrous in its own way, while also wanting to eventually get to a solid emotional moment for Declan and Delores in the end, and it just doesn’t work. So much of the film makes these two seem like cartoon characters, and so when the film gets down to giving them a very humanistic conclusion, the work hasn’t been done to earn this type of moment. At least in the very final scene, we get to see what Twohy’s vision for this concept was, and it does end with a nice moment of reflection and understanding, but it’s too little too late when most of what we’ve been doing is choking down cabbage jokes.
‘Bubble & Squeak’ Does Have Some Fun Cameos Though

To be fair, Patel and Goldberg are doing their best with this bizarre concept, and considering how specific Twohy’s vision for this dialogue and world is, it’s hard for them to come up for air sometimes. But some of the characters they meet along the way make this journey enjoyable. Berry doesn’t have much to do here, and we only get him in glimpses, but his poor Herzog impression does provide some laughs. So does Yeun, who only has one major scene in the opening, then unfortunately fades away. But the biggest jolt to this story comes in Franco’s bear-wearing cabbage-smuggler Norman, who shakes up the dynamic between Declan and Delores and provides our first major speedbump for their relationship. Franco is the bolt of energy that Bubble & Squeak needs halfway through and moves this story into something more personal and real, even though there are plenty of cabbage jokes still presented in this period as well.
If there’s anything the Franco scenes and the conclusion show us about Bubble & Squeak, it’s that the unusual cabbage nonsense and telling a more human story can coalesce into one effective narrative. Unfortunately, Bubble & Squeak far more often embraces the ridiculous more than the realistic, and ultimately struggles to combine these two into a whole that works. It’s hard to care for these characters when we barely see them as actual people. Absurdity is great in comedy, as we’ve seen in plenty of Sundance films that have made it big over the decades, but more often than not, they have to still have some grounding to make them fully effective.
Bubble & Squeak had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Bubble & Squeak

Evan Twohy’s Bubble & Squeak is a strange, one-joke comedy that even its excellent cast can’t save.

Release Date

January 24, 2025

Runtime

95 Minutes

Director

William Bridges

Writers

William Bridges

Pros & Cons

Dave Franco and Matt Berry are enjoyable in strange cameos.
Bubble & Squeak has a surprising amount of heart that the rest of the film doesn’t quite have.

There are only so many jokes you can make about cabbages?let alone center an entire movie around cabbage jokes.
Twohy’s screenplay rarely escalates this into more than just a series of cabbage jokes.