Reality

An absurdist film in which the director sarcastically mocks common sense and audience expectations.

Somewhere in the woods, a taxidermist kills a wild boar in front of his daughter named Reality. Inside the animal, they find a blue videotape. "Dad, how did it get there?" — "You must be imagining things, dear. There was no tape there. Now go to sleep." Meanwhile, a producer watches Reality falling asleep in the cinema. "Why are we watching this? Is this a movie?" — "Yes, damn it, I'm filming reality, and I'll film it the way I want!" insists the director. The producer gets angry and goes to meet a debut filmmaker who asks for money for a film about how television burns people from the inside until they explode. The producer agrees but sets a condition: the filmmaker must find the perfect scream that people will make when they die on screen.

The plots intertwine, resembling either a Möbius strip or a matryoshka doll, and at some point, the viewer may feel like a version of Schrödinger's cat. Are you still alive? And is reality already asleep?

"I believe the market is flooded with so-called normal films," Dupieux tries to explain something about his movies. Reality is at the core of most films: relationships between couples, friends, what happens when a family loses a child, what happens when someone has cancer. My quest is to avoid reality as much as possible. The structure of the script, character development — none of that interests me at all. Instead of trying to be Spielberg and make more comprehensible films with beautiful shots or emulating Kubrick like many young directors do, I stick to a more childlike model of behavior. I’d rather dig in my sandbox with my methods and beliefs than shoot like everyone else."