Le Vertigo: a (still) disappointing Dupieux (review)
After a promising start, his first animated film gets lost between counter metaphysics and gloubi-boulga on the emptiness of the tech world.
Quentin Dupieux makes animated films? Well, gosh, we didn’t see it coming. But obviously, there is a twist: the director of Yannick, Le Daim ou Mandibles decided to surround himself with a very small group of animators and to borrow a radical aesthetic, close to the crude 3D video games of the first PlayStation. Very funny idea to which is added a scenario where the characters of Alain Chabat and Jonathan Cohen realize that the world around them does not really exist, and that they live in a simulation full of bugs.
The trailer, which was frankly hilarious (“Your thing is pissing me off”), promised that we were going to at least have a hard time, or even witness a sort of rebirth of the prolific director. That’s not quite what happened, the film throwing out its best (only?) jokes in the first twenty minutes and then completely collapsing, lost between counter metaphysics and a blooper about the emptiness of the tech world. And while Dupieux was firmly expected in the field of visual experimentation, he chose to limit himself to two or three well-felt gags (huge sequence of the baby’s shower) and to desert the cartoonish field offered by animation. Paradoxically, the film’s promotion, which transformed actors and journalists into polygons, was much more stimulating.
By Quentin Dupieux. With Alain Chabat, Jonathan Cohen, Anaïs Demoustier… Duration: 1h07. Released June 10, 2026
