Incredible But True Review: A Tale of Vanity and Madness Forged on Creative Autopilot

Incredible But True endlessly draws out every stilted interaction for maximum deadpan effect.

Incredible But True
Photo: Berlinale

Quentin Dupieux’s mind is a veritable factory of cinematic absurdism. His films are marked by an innocuous brand of surrealism that can yield all sorts of pithy surprises, but their premises have increasingly begun to feel like they’re an end unto themselves. His last film, Mandibles, concerned the relationship between two lovable, small-minded losers and a giant fly, and his latest, Incredible But True, pivots on a mysterious tunnel that turns a middle-aged couple’s life completely upside down. To look at Dupieux’s canon is to be reminded of the hilarious South Park episode where Cartman discovers that Family Guy’s writers are manatees who use “idea balls” to create plotlines.

At the start of Incredible But True, Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Léa Drucker) fumble for the words to explain something to their attentive physician (Grégoire Bonnet). “We’re afraid you’ll think we’re crazies,” Marie says, nervously laughing alongside her husband. The film then flashes back to detail the wrinkle in their lives that brought them to their doctor’s office: a time portal in the basement of their newly purchased dream home.

At a scant 74 minutes, Incredible But True is slight even by the standards of Dupieux’s recent work, drawing out every stilted interaction for maximum deadpan effect. Upon showing Alain and Marie the time portal, which is just a nondescript manhole on the basement floor of their future home, their real estate agent (Stéphane Pezerat) takes a comical eternity to explain to them what exactly it is. As Alain and Marie’s enough-already exasperation with his stalling starts to mirror our own, he finally reveals the tunnel’s secret: When climbing down the duct, which leads to an exit on the ceiling of the ground floor in the very same house, time jumps forward 12 hours. At the same time, though, the traveller de-ages by three days.

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Incredible But True is nothing if not laden with metaphorical opportunity. Much to Alain’s dismay, Marie becomes addicted to climbing through the portal, slowly but surely becoming visibly younger. Dupieux parallels this with a side story concerning Alain’s boss and sort-of friend, Gérard (Benoît Magimel), who’s undergone an operation to have his penis replaced with a more efficient electric model, a decision that goes expectedly haywire. But the mere inclusion of both of these bluntly allegorical plotlines is more or less the beginning and end of any sort of inquiry into the vanity of these two especially desperate characters.

This void of insight shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise to even fans of Dupieux’s work, as the motivating forces behind his stories can be staunchly summed by that mantra of “no reason” that Stephen Spinella’s small-town sheriff from Rubber uses to justify the greatness of certain films. His best work, like Wrong and Reality, is thrilling because of the giddy, bizarre, and often nonsensical paths they take toward unpredictable destinations, often obliterating the conventional structures of cinematic storytelling along the way.

By contrast, Incredible But True follows a more straight and narrow road to an expected finale. When Marie finally faces the horrifying predicament that’s the reason for her doctor’s visit, the morbid humor and shock value of the situation is sapped by Incredible But True’s uninspired foreshadowing of the moment throughout. By the end of its runtime, this small, initially weird, but ultimately unreflective film ends up providing little more than evidence that Dupieux is following an artistic trajectory that’s on disappointing autopilot.

Score: 
 Cast: Alain Chabat, Léa Drucker, Benoît Magimel, Anaïs Demoustier  Director: Quentin Dupieux  Screenwriter: Quentin Dupieux  Running Time: 74 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

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