Baby's Day Out

The putrid, writhing outrage leveled at Son of the Mask merely confirms its avant-garde brilliance. In its brazen confrontation of bourgeois anxieties, it becomes a funhouse mirror reflecting the very demons polite society seeks to bury. The film embraces a carnivalesque spirit, reveling in a discombobulating tapestry of visual invention-- the sublime and the grotesque intertwined.

Son of the Mask operates according to its own internal logic, as if beamed down from a planet where advertising aesthetics reign supreme. Its manicured lawns and immaculate interiors are less set pieces than symbolic landscapes, akin to the hallucinatory vistas of Jodorowsky. What seems to be simple slapstick instead unfolds as a harrowing parable, laying bare the suffocating emptiness of consumer culture. To recoil in horror is merely to recognize the ugliness already festering.