Barefoot (2014)

A certain exhaustion settles in when a film announces its premise with total confidence and then grosses fifteen thousand and seventy-one dollars. Barefoot, the 2014 English-language remake of the German Barfuss, is that film. It follows Jay Wheeler, the black sheep of a wealthy family, who works as a hospital janitor on probation and absconds with Daisy, a psychiatric patient raised in isolation and, per the title, without shoes. He brings her to his brother's wedding in New Orleans to persuade his parents that his life has straightened out. The setup is a romantic comedy. The execution is a cautionary tale about what happens when nobody in the room says no.

The film carries no social architecture whatsoever. The cast is uniformly white. There is no queer presence, no engagement with race, no environmental concern, no meditation on wealth beyond using a father's checkbook as a plot device. Money here is a personal redemption token, not a target of critique. Daisy is not a feminist figure; she is a childlike caricature, and reviewers at the time described the film as sexist and infantilizing, with a cartoon heroine who seems to have wandered in from a fairy tale. Mental illness gets the worst of it. A psychiatric patient is central, yet the film romanticizes her condition as an endearing quirk, which is the opposite of destigmatizing. The press called it the adorable mental illness genre, and the label has stuck for good reason.

What remains is a romantic comedy with no chemistry and no message. It does not lecture. It does not preach. It simply presents a woman with a serious diagnosis as a charming accessory and hopes the audience finds it sweet. The result is not offensive in an instructive way. It is offensive in a lazy way, which is worse. Nineteen percent on Rotten Tomatoes feels generous. The classification is clean: this is a film with nothing to say and no awareness that it should.