

There are certainly notes of The Breaker Upperers – the 2018 comedy Van Beek wrote, directed and starred in – in Nude Tuesday both have a certain emotional agility, with the latter ping-ponging between slapstick farce and devastating catharsis without letting any moment percolate too long, lest it descend into schmaltz. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning They flail about like apes, held by the gentle embrace of nature, returning to their primal forms – swinging appendages and all. There is breathwork that sounds like climaxing and climaxing that sounds like breathwork. They cup each other’s crotches as grounding exercise.

It’s a feat, then, that Herriman and Van Beek – alongside a sideshow of oddballs, including the Australian TikTok star Ian Zaro as a blustering but big-hearted foil to Bruno, and Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement as their fraudulent cult leader-cum-love guru called (of course) Bjorg – keep the foregone conclusion at bay, just long enough to indulge in a raft of slapstick antics. By the time they settle into the tantric rhythms of their orgiastic oasis, we can already see how this film might end: with the once-sheltered couple stripping away traumas and undergarments to reveal something feral and innate within themselves, to excavate the identities they’ve lost to the churn of domesticity. So Bruno and Laura – stuffy and stiff – come to experience the ways of their free-wheeling, free-balling peers – stiffied and stuffed. The power of the hog … Jemaine Clement as Bjorg.
