A rancid comedy that suggests Todd Haynes' Safe remade as a perversely depressing slapstick romp, Bubble Boy stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a boy born without immunities who spends his childhood and adolescence indoors, ensconced in a room filled with protective bubble wrap. Gyllenhaal grows up to be a surprisingly well-adjusted young man, but has reason to venture out of his plastic womb when the pretty next-door neighbor he loves (Pleasantville's Marley Shelton) heads to Niagara Falls to marry a brutish rocker. Venturing into the outside world for the first time, Gyllenhaal makes like a circular Candide, adrift in a nightmarish hellscape populated by freaks both literal (a traveling freak show run by Verne Troyer) and otherwise (nearly everyone else he encounters). It's not surprising that Bubble Boy is excruciatingly unfunny—anybody who's seen a preview has likely figured that out already—but it's also nasty, coarse, and ugly enough to provide some shocks. Advocates for people with immunity disorders have urged a boycott of the film, but Bubble Boy is an equal-opportunity offender, reducing the sum of humanity to a series of shrill, laugh-free caricatures. Gyllenhaal's charmingly guileless performance and John Ottman's wistful score hint at a nicer movie lurking within, but those elements of sweetness only make the film's gags about little people, pinheads, old people, crazy-talking Asians, and so forth seem that much nastier. Even the relationship between Shelton and Gyllenhaal, ostensibly Bubble Boy's emotional core, feels creepy and wrong. One of the most singularly depressing comedies of the past few years, Bubble Boy is a brutal endurance test for both its protagonist and its audience.