An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn

Just when you thought life couldn’t get any stranger, along comes Jim Hosking with a curveball like An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn. Imaginative, awkward and inscrutable, this movie is the other-worldly lovechild of Napoleon Dynamite and Grand Budapest Hotel. The British filmmaker’s latest project – starring Aubrey Plaza as Lulu and the inimitable Jemaine Clement as Colin – is guaranteed to raise eyebrows and leave jaws hanging in speechless, bizarre wonder. 

A synopsis borders on useless here because of the sheer brain-whirring this feature generates. Nevertheless, when Lulu discovers that Beverly Luff Linn’s magical one-night-only show is in town, she and Colin set out to see it at all costs. It is a performance that you will not forget in a hurry, though it is not necessarily worth the wait. 

Hosking’s universe for the film is very pleasing to the eye. Garish and over the top, it meshes the egregious fashion and hairstyles into a wicked ugly-chic. The acting is eerie, awkward, the characters naughty and nauseating – in the best, most delightful way possible. It is certainly an unusual voice for a director, but it is not impossible to compare him to others. 

Clement is bone-dry as usual – he could read the phone book and still make you laugh. Plaza is her usual sardonic self as Lulu, but the role perhaps doesn’t give her enough wiggle-room to really make your skin crawl. 

In a sense, this augurs quite badly for the picture as a whole. With such a surreal and off-beat vibe, this movie has got to deliver consistent laughs to really prevail, yet there are some lulls that linger for slightly too long. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn for its cinematic black magic; let’s hope that the director pushes on with more of his weird and wonderful creations.

Daniel Amir

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn does not have a UK release date yet.

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