Critic Reviews

Hello Dankness uses a specific language that might alienate part of the public. But any attempt to make the movie more accessible would diminish the mesmerizing effect of watching a feature-length meme.

A stinging political, social, and media critique made from digitally altered bits and pieces of entertainment favorites, at once hilarious, enraged, and as zonked out of its mind as many viewers will prefer to be while watching it.

There’s a sense everything is up for grabs and the end is nigh: of consensus reality; of cinema and copyright legislation as we know it. Pop culture’s infinite cycle always spits out and reassembles content; here the process is explicit, amplified, and turbocharged.

Hello Dankness belongs to a venerable underground-film tradition of treating refracted entertainment as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” could help but smile.

Hello Dankness ultimately feels like a lockdown project; an in-joke between friends, assembled when there was nothing better to do in the world, and now an irrelevancy.