Dreaming of becoming a well known director, Jason, who receives an offer from a wealthy man to finance his horror movie if he finds the best groan of pain to lead it to Oscar, the thing that challenges him, as he has only 48 hours to find it.
Dupieux's movie is all script twists, lacking both the naïve wonder of the films to which he pays homage and the inventive sophistication of grand Surrealist fantasy.
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.
Quentin Dupieux is doing something few other directors manage these days: making ridiculous movies with their own language and tone, utterly odd, yet strangely entertaining.
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.
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.
It's not that the strangeness is any less appealing, but that there's no more urgency to it - Rubber had a killer tire on the loose, and Wrong had a lost dog...[This] lacks that level of drama
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.