The film will only work for you if you expect it not to make sense, and enjoy jokes that go on and on and then suddenly (and repeatedly) jack-knife off a cliff or two.
Too transitory and too undemanding to be termed a mindfuck, for Reality minditch seems about right, and it's one you even occasionally get the pleasure of scratching.
A viewer can’t help but take it as an artistic statement, even though nothing — not even the nods to Mulholland Dr. — suggests that Dupieux’s motivated by anything more than a hankering to make something weird and funny. He succeeds on the first part, and fitfully accomplishes the second.
63
Slant MagazineChuck Bowen
Slant MagazineChuck Bowen
Quentin Dupieux has a talent for rendering otherworldly concepts banal in a manner that reflects the stymied desires of his characters.
Each narrative fissure further thwarts meaning. The most you can ask from a movie as nullifying as this one is that it offer wit and visual panache, which it does.
50
The DissolveScott Tobias
The DissolveScott Tobias
The accumulation of weird incidents and fake-outs doesn’t lead anywhere productive. That’s the problem with Dupieux’s vacant brand of surrealism: If you just keep pulling out the rug, there will never be anything to stand on.
The bizarro plot threads, and dippy characters fail to connect in any rewarding way, resulting in a largely unfunny film that proves as repetitive and tedious as the 1971 Philip Glass snippet that provides its entire score.