dankness

The setting is open and light, the exact opposite of the bank-vault dankness of last season’s Armory Show at the Javits Center.

In the pop-culture universe deconstructed — and reconstructed — in “Hello Dankness,” the Ninja Turtles parse the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, Nancy from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” has lost sleep over the end of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and a “Home Alone”-era Macaulay Culkin spends his pandemic watching “Tiger King.”

High polish is out; a resourceful and sometimes hedonistic spirit, as well as frankness and dankness, are in, occasionally in ways that verge on counterculture cliché.

About the imprint of the landscape on her, she writes, “I smelled like so many things, from a long day in the forest, but mostly like the beautiful dankness of it, and even still, I’d never be as outside as the underbelly of a wolf or the caked earth beneath a fox’s nail.”

The pacing is sometimes shaggy, and the boys’ motivations are occasionally mysterious, but Guðmundsson’s young actors are magnetic in a physical, haunted way, and the talented Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen finds a dankness of texture and color that punctuates everything from sweat and light on pasty skin to the general grey/green gloom of the boys’ neighborhood.