This is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen at Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah — Attending the Sundance Film Festival is a lot like dumpster diving. You have to sort through a mountain of trash to find a few hidden gems. While wearing boots.

Well, it’s only two days in, and I’ve already encountered a pinch-your-nose pile of rotting produce. That would be “Bubble & Squeak,” which premiered on Friday night. It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen at Sundance.

Its abject awfulness is not due to the usual reasons that a festival flick flatlines, such as overtly disgusting subject matter or being artsy to the point of incomprehensible.

“Bubble & Squeak,” written and directed by Evan Twohy, is a comedy, hold the laughs, about a fictional European nation that has banned cabbage.

That, folks, is its one and only joke. And yet there are 94 minutes to go.  

It’s almost amusing when actors Sarah Goldberg and Himesh Patel’s Delores and Declan are held at customs for allegedly smuggling the veg during their honeymoon. Flabbergasted, they’re told by a Slavic agent (Steven Yeun) they must pay a $70,000 fine and decide which one of them will die.

Instead of voluntary execution, the duo decides to break out of the holding room and make a run for it. Delores stands up, and we observe she obviously has about 30 heads of cabbage stuffed in her pants. The film should’ve ended there.  

But it gratingly forges on. The couple’s tedious slog through woods to cross the border is a faux-eccentric, self-indulgent, beige chore that’s met with silence. Is this a movie premiere, or a 4 p.m. open mic on a Tuesday?

Declan is a matter-of-fact Scout Master type, who authoritatively cites his guidebook over and over. Warmer Delores — as warm as anybody gets in this cinematic tundra, anyway — wished to vacation somewhere tropical. She naively dreams of “swimming with the jellyfish.” Now, she’s a fugitive trekking through the dirt.

For the entire film, Patel and Goldberg speak in an irksome robotic monotone seemingly designed to say, “You’re at a weird movie!”. Some festival-goers suggested the director is channeling Wes Anderson. But the humor is neither dry nor smart. Everybody just acts like cabbage.

I like both actors, and especially Patel in “Station 11.” But the viewer does not care a lick about these characters or what happens to them. If we’re not laughing at Delores and Declan, and we’re not invested in their fate, what’s left?

Underwhelming, groaner situations is what.

They’re chased by a Javert-like policeman named Shazbor (Matt Berry), who the script incorrectly thinks is a riot. A guard-dog-like child named Timotej smells cruciferous contraband on the Americans and traps them in his net.

One scene during a small village festival, in which the Russian-sounding locals beat a man dressed as a giant head of cabbage, is a “Borat” ripoff. 

And the pair encounter another illegal seller, played by Dave Franco wearing a bear suit, who tests their marriage with his flirting and physique.

Meanwhile, the whole experience tested my patience.

The climax, which takes place in a church made entirely of hay, has delusions of profundity. It’s not funny, wise or heartfelt — only long.

Twohy’s gives his film a washed-out old textbook aesthetic, and he uses fisheye lenses like Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”) likes to. However, no visual world is built. The fake country looks fake. And “Bubble & Squeak” comes short of being stylish.

The story is told in a series of many chapters. A lucky friend texted me, “I left at Chapter 4.”