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Acting
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Directing
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Story
Starring: Jack Plotnick, Alexis Dziena, William Fichtner
Director: Quentin Dupieux
Running Time: 96 mins
Wrong is a French film about a man who loses the love of his life, his dog Paul, and sets out to find him despite a world of adversity that is slowly causing him to lose his sanity.
From the visionary director of Rubber, Quentin Dupieux, this is another ridiculous surrealistic comedy, with consistently insane humour, understated and depressing characters, but it just isn’t so mind-bending or properly funny to really weird you out.
On the plus side, this is a better-made film than Rubber. The performances are very good, with the central show by Jack Plotnik working very well, as you get a character that is both silly and funny to laugh at, but also very easy to relate to and support, which makes the loss of his dog a bit sadder and his quest to find him all the more interesting.
However, the rest of this film just doesn’t have the shock value as Dupieux’s previous. It’s surreal and funny to some extent, but throughout, the weirdness just isn’t that insane to make it something that you will wet yourself laughing at, instead, you’ll probably just chuckle a bit.
What’s more is that this film is told in a conventional storyline, whilst Rubber had that excellent divide between the tyre and the viewers, something that was massively original and hugely intriguing despite not being pulled off to the best it could have been. Here, it’s simply a story about a man trying to find his dog – there’s nothing weird about that, and whilst the secondary plot is a little bit confusing, it’s more silly that genuinely mind-bending, meaning that this isn’t so much of a bizarre experience to watch.
The main thing about this film is that whilst it doesn’t live up the originality or shock of other films by Dupieux, it’s at least somewhat more accessible to most people, because the storyline is intelligible, and the comedy isn’t so extremely strange that you can’t get it – it’s just odd, and that’s why this gets a 5.9 from me.
