Black, White, and Forbidden Fruit: Style and Allegory in Mark H. Rapaport's 'Hippo'

Left to right: Mark H. Rapaport, Kimball Farley, Eliza Roberts, Lilla Kizlinger, Jesse Pimentel. Photo by William Tracy Babcock.

Welcome to the Aquarium: An Introduction to ‘Hippo’

Mark H. Rapaport’s debut feature, “Hippo,” plunges viewers into a world both starkly contained and brimming with unsettling meaning. Starring Kimball Farley as the titular Hippo and Lilla Kizlinger as his step-sister Buttercup, the film confines us almost entirely within the walls of a single suburban home, rendered in crisp black and white. It’s a challenging, provocative piece that explores profound alienation and fractured family bonds. But beyond the immediate psychological drama, “Hippo” functions as a potent, modern allegory. This analysis explores how the film’s deliberate aesthetic constraints—its monochrome palette and single location—serve not as limitations, but as the very stage upon which a contemporary retelling of an Edenic fall unfolds, complete with digital-age anxieties.

The Aesthetics of Entrapment: Maximalism Through Minimalism

The visual world of “Hippo” is immediately striking. The black and white cinematography strips away the familiar, lending an air of timeless fable or, perhaps more accurately, a persistent nightmare. This choice, coupled with the relentless focus on the interior of the house, creates an intense claustrophobia. We are trapped with these characters, forced into uncomfortable intimacy with their simmering tensions and unspoken desires.

This minimalist setup paradoxically generates a maximalist psychological effect. By eschewing exterior locations and colour, Rapaport forces our attention onto the nuances of performance, the weight of silence, and the oppressive atmosphere itself. The house ceases to be just a setting; it becomes a character, a pressure cooker amplifying every strained interaction and internal conflict. The stark visuals become a direct mirror for the characters’ inner lives—their isolation, their moral ambiguity, and the seemingly inescapable confines of their psychological and physical reality. This enforced focus is crucial, preparing the ground for the allegorical layers beneath the surface drama.

Paradise Lost in Suburbia: A Digital Age Eden

The core interpretive power of “Hippo” may lie in its function as a modern Biblical allegory, specifically a retelling of the fall in the Garden of Eden, twisted through the lens of contemporary dysfunction.

• The Flawed Garden: The house itself represents this Eden – isolated, self-contained, yet deeply flawed. Significantly, it lacks a clear, benevolent authority figure, creating a vacuum where conventional rules seem suspended, replaced by the characters’ own nascent, often distorted, moral codes.
• The Inhabitants - Primal Adam & Digital Seeker: Hippo, with his animalistic name suggesting primal urges, embodies a kind of Adam figure. Yet, he’s an Adam for the digital age. His deep immersion in video games offers more than escape; it appears to be a search for order, morality, or guidance within the game’s logic and through interaction with its non-player characters (NPCs), who might function as ersatz angels or messengers in a world devoid of traditional spiritual anchors. He exists between the physical world of the house and the virtual world of the screen, seeking meaning in the pixels.
• Eve and the Forbidden Knowledge: Buttercup takes on the role of Eve, the catalyst for transgression. Her motivations seem rooted in a desire to break the stasis of their confined existence, to reach for an external experience or knowledge deemed ‘forbidden’ within their closed system. Her manipulation of Hippo to bring an outsider—a ‘false prophet’ or serpent figure—into their Eden represents this reach.
• The Fall: The arrival of this external influence and the actions that follow constitute the ‘fall.’ It’s a transgression born of desire, manipulation, and the inherent instability of their isolated world. The consequences, however they unfold within the film’s narrative, shatter the fragile, perverse equilibrium of their ‘garden,’ leading not necessarily to divine punishment, but to a very human, and potentially more disturbing, reckoning within the confines of their inescapable home.

Digital Ghosts in the Garden Machine

What makes this allegorical reading particularly resonant for contemporary audiences is the integration of Hippo’s gaming. It’s not just a character quirk; it’s a vital layer of the modern Eden. The video game represents a new kind of virtual space where morality can be simulated, rules are explicit (unlike the ambiguous rules of the house), and guidance can be sought from programmed entities.

Does the game offer genuine wisdom, or merely a different form of entrapment? Is Hippo’s attempt to find virtue in the game a futile gesture in a fundamentally amoral household, or a legitimate search for meaning in the digital age? This element updates the ancient allegory, reflecting modern anxieties about connection, reality, and finding moral compasses when traditional structures have eroded. The digital realm becomes another layer of the garden wall – perhaps escape, perhaps just another illusion.

Conclusion: A Bleakly Modern Fable

“Hippo” stands out as a powerful, unsettling debut. Through its rigorous stylistic control – the claustrophobic setting and stark black-and-white visuals – Mark H. Rapaport crafts not just a psychological drama, but a potent, bleakly modern fable. By framing its narrative of alienation and transgression within the structure of an Edenic allegory, updated with the anxieties of the digital age, the film forces viewers to confront uncomfortable questions about innocence, desire, morality, and the search for meaning in confined, disconnected worlds. It’s a film that lingers, its stark images and challenging themes echoing long after the credits roll, proving the enduring power of allegorical storytelling even—or perhaps especially—within the most minimalist of frames.

“Mother!(by Darren Aronofsky)”: I can definitely see the parallel. Both use a confined domestic space that becomes invaded and violated, layering heavy allegory (biblical in both cases, arguably) onto intense psychological drama. Both build a sense of dread and inevitability within that space.