Jacques (original voice: Alain Chabat) rings his friend Bruno (Jonathan Cohen) out of bed at 5:52 a.m. with a message that is “more important than cancer.” His urgent realization: the world is a simulation; nothing and no one really exists! Of course, it causes a stir when an established director suddenly presents a film at the world’s most important film festival that looks as if it was made in the engine of a PlayStation 2 game. But before we get to Quentin Dupieux (“Smoking Causes Coughing”) and his Cannes contribution “Vertiginous”, I would first like to write about something that is particularly close to my heart – namely about a Berlin machinist who died in 2002 at the age of 95.
It wasn’t until he was well into retirement that Bruno Sukrow came across a computer program that could be used to create the simplest animated films on the level of role-playing cutscenes from the 1990s. So, when he was 80, he began making animated films all by himself, without any prior knowledge – especially in his personal favorite genres of adventure, horror, crime and science fiction. Initially, Sukrow was particularly annoyed with his own relatives with the results. But then word got around and, purely by chance, the first critics became aware of the equally unambitious, amateurish and bluntly individualistic films. To make a long story short: In the end, more than 100 films were collected, which were increasingly enthusiastically received at international (underground) film festivals. You can watch some of them on YouTube – for example this one:
For Sukrow, the simple computer program was the opportunity to finally implement the film ideas that had been brewing in his mind for a long time. Dupieux, on the other hand, celebrated another world premiere on the Croisette just a few days earlier with the fantasy satire “Full Phil”, for which he had Hollywood stars Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson at his disposal. So when he feeds his motion capture recordings into the open source 3D software Blender to make it look like a retro game, he’s doing it primarily as an (advertising) gimmick. After all, there are so-called machinima, films rendered in game engines, in abundance – just online or at festivals explicitly intended for this purpose, but not as the closing film of a Cannes section.
It was a big laugh for the festival audience when a hand glided through the lock when opening a door or the characters walked strangely – fair enoughthat was no different for me with my first Engine films. But one would have expected a whole new level from Dupieux, who now implements two to three brilliant film ideas a year – from a psychopathic car tire with telekinetic murder abilities to an oversized fly in the trunk. Based on the film’s subject matter alone, the choice of animation style makes sense, but “Vertiginous” still never achieves the level of brilliant madness that one had actually hoped for with this mix of form and director.
Jacques tells his friend Bruno about his incredible discovery!
Jacques figured out the pee simulation thing. Because the public toilet was occupied, he sneaked behind the bushes and opened a manhole cover there. In the shaft a pigeon flew in place – and even if he pushed it or carried it somewhere else, it always returned to its starting point. Just a glitch – and Alain has now collected 265 of them. You know how it is: once you notice something, you suddenly see it everywhere! Dupieux goes wonderfully over the top.
The glitches include not only dog poop disappearing into thin air – but also people simply standing upright in the area without legs. But instead of enjoying such absurdities even more, Dupieux also tells the story of a fatal power hubris in his animated debut, which lasts just over an hour, when Bruno takes advantage of the discovery to create a tech company from the ground up as a Steve Jobs caricature. That’s all well and good, but also a bit trite. Plus, just like the idea of using a retro game engine for a film, it actually comes a good decade too late.
Conclusion: Another enjoyable, just 67-minute-long finger exercise from frequent filmmaker Quentin Dupieux – only this time with “Vertiginous”, created using open source 3D software, he is going wild in a field in which others have already created more with less.
We saw “Vertiginous” at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere as the final film in the Quinzaine Des Cinéastes series.