The Package (2018)

The Package arrives from Netflix with a title that production history suggests was once Eggplant Emoji, and the finished product honors that lineage with a devotion bordering on the monastic. A group of teenagers drive into the woods for spring break. One of them, startled while urinating with a knife in hand, severs his own penis. What follows is a race across state lines to reunite the organ with its owner, involving a rattlesnake bite, a venom extraction performed mouth to flesh, a foul-mouthed child, a stolen boat, and a gas station clerk who performs an act of patriotic hygiene. The film is ninety-four minutes of this. It is not apologizing.

From a cultural standpoint, the ledger is nearly blank, and the blankness feels honest. The ensemble includes Geraldine Viswanathan and Eduardo Franco, whose presence registers as ordinary casting rather than a statement. Nobody remarks on it. Nobody is meant to. Becky, the nominal female lead, functions as a romantic destination and a reactor to chaos; the screenplay grants her no interiority and no grievance, which is either a lapse or simply a comedy written by two men about two men and a severed appendage. Questions of race, class, climate, and bodily self-regard go unasked. The body here is a punchline, not a platform.

A case could be made that this is the most ideologically inert comedy of its decade, and I make it without enthusiasm. The film lectures no one. It carries no lesson about consent, no arc of self-discovery, no third-act speech about becoming your best self. It aims to shock and amuse, succeeding at the first and only intermittently at the second. Rotten Tomatoes reports a thirty-seven percent approval rating, and the critics' consensus is a single devastating sentence about penis jokes. That consensus is correct. The Package is crude, aimless, and entirely free of social instruction, a distinction that in 2018 should not feel like an achievement but somehow does.