Vertiginous

From Viennale

Over the past two decades, the tirelessly prolific French director Quentin Dupieux has built a reputation as a high-concept humourist with a taste for the darkly absurd. His comedies hinge on deliciously harebrained conceits—a killer tyre, a giant pet fly, a team of superheroes apparently sponsored by Big Tobacco—yet none delves so deeply into the uncanny valley as his most recent Cannes-premiering gambit LE VERTIGE. Made with basic motion-capture software, Dupieux’s first 3D-animated film conjures an alternate reality filled with deliberately crude and glitchy images. In the wee hours of the morning, Jacky (Alain Chabat) arrives at the house of his best friend Bruno (Jonathan Cohen) desperate to share proof that their world is a simulation. The fact that the men look like blocky figures from a nineties video game deepens the irony as they scour their environments for defective objects, like a pigeon floating inside a sewer hole and a blinking pile of dog poop. The warped mundanity of these visuals, matched with torrents of playfully paranoid philosophical screeds, makes for a timely trip down the rabbit hole radiating the anxiety of an AI-driven future. (Beatrice Loayza)