After a crop of intermittently amusing but frustratingly alienating head-spinners, filmmaker/musician Quentin Dupieux has adopted the broad anti-comedy as his brand. His last film, 2010’s Rubber, followed the unlikeliest of protagonists – a sentient, vengeful car tire. The nagging problem with Rubber is its “no reason” foundation. The film opens with a buzzkill of a monologue delivered directly to camera by the film’s lead human character, a sheriff (Stephen Spinella) who repeatedly tells the audience that none of what it’s about to see has, or needs, an explanation. He hammers home the conceit that all the weirdness is just weirdness for weirdness’s sake, casting an increasingly boring pall over the whole of what could have easily lent itself to midnight-movie euphoria, but instead leaves one inexplicably longing for a more conventionally told movie about a tire that rolls around the desert while telepathically making heads explode.
Dupieux’s follow-up matches the absurdity of that film but retains enough inklings of reality to render its wackiness incidental. Wrong is a story about a man searching for his missing dog first, and a smattering of wildly surreal vignettes second. Jack Plotnick is sublime as Dolph Springer, reacting with appropriate bafflement to the slew of increasingly backwards characters he encounters on his quest to track down his dog, Paul. Dolph is the perfect audience stand-in for Dupieux’s off-kilter landscape, a detail noticeably absent from Rubber. He seems to have been warped from our world to a sideways dimension where it’s normal for a clock to change from 7:59 to 7:60, and acceptable for an indoor office to be perpetually caught in a torrential downpour.
One of the most disconcerting differences from our world and the one Dupieux has cultivated in Wrong is the extreme patience exercised over the phone by a receptionist at a pizza parlor. Dolph calls the number not to place an order, but to ask a series of disgruntled questions about the restaurant’s logo, which he finds inscrutable. The conversation he has with the receptionist is nearly incomprehensible, but almost unbearably sweet. The honey-voiced Emma (Alexis Dziena) is too pleasant to be believably human, but her desperate yearning for a personal connection is certainly familiar, as is Dolph’s incredulity when ousted from his job and tearful rollercoaster of emotions upon learning the truth about his dog’s disappearance. Wrong works best when the characters are recognizable even when their surroundings are not.
William Fichtner as Master Chang in Quentin Dupieux’s ‘Wrong’
The film plays like a comic perversion of the alternate dimensions in every episode of “The Twilight Zone.” The grander mystery of the lost dog in Wrong overshadows the peripheral peculiarities, which serve mostly as backdrop. Dupieux (who also edits, shoots, and scores), makes the healthy decision here not to account for the unexplainable. The “no reason” speech from Rubber could easily apply to just about everything that happens in Wrong, but then again, it could also apply to any exercise in fiction.
And then, of course, there’s William Fichtner. In a just world, the acclaimed character actor would be up for a Best Supporting Actor nomination at next year’s Academy Awards for his ascot-sporting, well-meaning petnapper Master Chang. He’s breathlessly hilarious as the mysterious guru with an impressive braided rattail, and his put-on cadence dangles somewhere between implacable accent and unfortunate speech impediment. Like the film itself, he’s completely addictive.
In Wrong, Dupieux indulges a skewed perception of the world reminiscent of our lucid dreams, or an immersive video game, then widens the scope of his fantasy universe from a neighborhood in Los Angeles to the literal edge of the planet. Seeking more out of life, Dolph’s neighbor Mike (Regan Burns) takes a drive and ends up on what appears to be a dried-up lake. While staring ahead into arid infinity, Mike calls Dolph to tell him he’s reached the end of the world… and he’s going to keep driving, declaring, “I kinda want to see what’s after.” It’s irresistible stuff.
Wrong is currently available to stream on Netflix Instant.
