Vertiginous (Le Vertige) at Fantastic Fest, 17th Sept 2026
“I’ve cracked the system,” declares Jacky (voiced by Alain Chabat) – repeatedly – in Quentin Dupieux’s Vertiginous. Jacky has come to the apartment of his friend Bruno (voiced by Jonathan Cohen) insisting on being let in to discuss something “really important”, even if it seems “pretty wacky”. In his eagerness to share his discovery with Bruno, Jacky is undeterred by the fact that it is 5.52 in the morning, or that Bruno’s wife Fabienne (voiced by Anaïs Demoustier) is pregnant – and he is not put off even when Fabienne’s waters break and she plops out a baby onto the kitchen floor in front of both men. For Jacky has become convinced that they are all living in a simulated reality – and takes the very fact that Bruno and Fabienne’s baby was born evidently without an umbilical cord as further proof of this. That day, Jacky will take the confused new father away from his family, to present him with an exhaustive, obsessive dossier of evidence that they are in a constructed world, and that there are many glitches in the matrix for those willing to see them.
Of course Dupieux is himself no stranger to constructing cinematic microcosms that reflect our own reality through a glass darkly (and absurdly) – and in Vertiginous he makes it obvious from the start that we are in a world of artifice, for everything here is presented in the stilted 3D animation of a Noughties Sims game. While the characters of Jacky and Bruno are grounded in their own banality and ready distraction, Dupieux leans hard into the uncanny valley which Bruno – and the mysterious Christophe Bourgeois (Jean-Marie Winling) – have long since noticed, and which Bruno is beginning to see.
Armed with his newly acquired self-awareness, the none-too-bright but narcissistic Bruno becomes convinced – or at least imagines – that only he is brilliant enough to understand and explicate this half life. So, decades later, he will be the self-appointed messiah-cum-marketer of existential alienation and its quack cure. He is the sleek new guru peddling onanistic, empty self-regard to all – including cinemagoers – who crave even a moment of transcendent experience, or a glimpse behind the curtain or beyond the screen. Characters like Bruno may well be living in a crude simulation, but they have plenty of their own shabby mendacity, plagiarism, betrayal, charlatanism, delusion, self-delusion and incomprehension to bring further distorting layers to their essential fictionality – and that is before Dupieux himself enters the picture in animated form, as all at once demiurge, dupe and doll (his iconic puppet Flat Eric also gets a cameo).
Although its English title Vertiginous is an adjective, the original French title Le Vertige is the noun ‘vertigo’, in imitation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film of the same name (voted greatest film of all time in Sight and Sound’s 2012 critics’ poll). The Fifties Vertigo was in fact released under the title Sueurs froides (or ‘cold sweats’) in France, but nonetheless Dupieux’s film, like Hitchcock’s, is a dizzying, duplicitous journey into a dream world of desire and disappointment. Vertiginous also comes with a sense of inferiority to its Hitchcockian namesake – self-consciously so, because this is a film in which characters look to their doubles with envy, and imagine that life is always greener on the other side of the mirror. We may watch these lo-fi schlubs projected onto the screen before us and laugh at their gamified vicissitudes, but in our own ridiculous world that surely cannot be all real, the joke may just be on us.
strap: S(t)imulating: Quentin Dupieux’s existentialist animation uses its own lo-fi artifice to make us question – and laugh at – reality itself
© Anton Bitel
