Quentin Dupieux Just Closed Cannes With a Feature Film That Runs Like a PlayStation 1 Game, Called La Vertige

Quentin Dupieux brought his first animated feature, called La Vertige, to the Directors’ Fortnight this year. It closed the section on May 21 and left audiences laughing at something that looked pulled straight from a 1998 console. The movie runs 67 minutes and puts its entire premise on display through the images themselves. Jacques heads to his friend Bruno’s place with big news. He has become convinced that everyday life takes place inside a computer simulation.

Every character on screen is made up of a few flat shapes with dull edges, a visual throwback to the early days of 3D gaming characters. Their movements felt rigid and purposefully mechanical, similar to those found in older open world games that required simple controls to function. Faces are slapped onto basic head shapes, with little expressiveness. It’s a look that is highly influenced by the age of GTA Vice City and other games from the time. Dupieux and a few others developed the entire thing inside Blender, with the help of five recent art school graduates. They used an iPhone and a cheap motion-capture tool to record the actors’ performances, which they then slapped onto the low-detail models without using any expensive rendering farms.

The essential idea here is that those constraints are intentional, and they play an important role in the comedy. A baker arrives with an extra finger at the end of his hand. A character’s skeleton is revealed in the middle of a high-stress situation. A birth scenario glides over all of the things we’d expect to see. Each of these bugs simply sort of…happens, and every time you see one, it’s more confirmation that the system isn’t quite up to par. By the time the characters notice, we, the audience, have already seen all of the proof.

As the story progresses, we meet a new character, a researcher who tries to explain everything in more detail. Time passes in fits and starts, as relationships change, and one character reappears years later with a new digital style that nonetheless adheres to the same fundamental structure we’ve seen throughout. The entire film revolves on the central idea that what people say about their surroundings does not always correspond to what we see in the photographs.

Dupieux has spent years experimenting with how far you can push this bizarre idea. The fact that we’re all viewing from the same constrained vantage point, with the same boring, low-poly figures as our characters, actually adds weight. They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are: simple structures that move, communicate, and occasionally break. The film will be released in French theaters on June 10th, while the rest of us will have to wait and see.