Small Apartments (2012)

Small Apartments is the kind of fearless, off-kilter comedy-drama that dares you to laugh, then catches you off guard with a strange little pulse of tenderness underneath the grime. Jonas Åkerlund stages a sun-bleached freak show of Southern California misfits, and Matt Lucas is magnetic at the center—playing Franklin Franklin as a walking contradiction: repellent, vulnerable, and weirdly endearing as the walls close in and his life turns into a frantic, darkly comic juggling act. The movie’s vibe is filthy-funny and nervy, with a supporting cast that pops in like unpredictable fireworks and keeps the whole thing humming with bad decisions and unexpected humanity. It’s not for everyone—there’s R-rated sexual content, corpse-related gross-out, and an intentionally disturbing edge—but if you like your crime stories skewed, your humor pitch-black, and your heart earned in odd places, this one’s a cult watch waiting to happen.

Small Apartments is clearly aiming for a grimy, offbeat crime-comedy where a pathetic screwup stumbles through a dead-body problem amid a parade of oddballs, and it commits hard to that “weird for weird’s sake” vibe. The problem is the tone lurches between crude farce, bleak tragedy, and cartoonish grotesquerie, so the story can feel like a string of random shocks and side tangents rather than a satisfying escalation. A lot of the humor leans on discomfort—sexual awkwardness, voyeurism, and corpse-related gags—so if you don’t enjoy being dared to laugh, this will feel more exhausting than edgy. On the plus side, the cast is game and the film has a distinctive, trashy visual style, but you’ll want to skip it if you’re looking for coherent plotting, characters you can invest in, or comedy that doesn’t bathe in sleaze.