A young Muslim woman (Dela Meskienyar) runs away from her overbearing aunt and uncle’s house desperate for a life free of religious restrictions. Stripped for cash and living on the streets, she befriends a young man (Cosmo Jarvis) from Coney Island who wears a menacing “Funny Face” mask at night. What thusly transpires in writer-director Tim Sutton’s “Funny Face” is an arthouse origin story, as our rage-filled masked protagonist turns himself into an extemporary superhero, pursuing revenge on the Trump-esque real estate mogul responsible for displacing his grandparents. At its essence, “Funny Face” has a simple story at its core (boy meets girl), one that is visually accomplished, but unnecessarily over-stylized. Sutton’s stunning Sundance debut (“Dark Night”) revolved around the Aurora movie theater shooting, and that was a much better movie because Sutton used his visual talents to tell a world of emotions without the pretensions needed for thematic and emotional resonance. “Funny Face” has too much of that. As our two protagonists embark on an after hours journey filled with danger, and love Sutton misguidingly resorts to visual overindulgence to compensate for his slim and overtly banal screenplay. He over-directs most of the scenes here, to the point of ad nauseum. It’s devoid of the substance it pretends to have.
SCORE: C