If the Grand Illusion Cinema chooses to book a movie about a guy and his lost dog for a two-week run, through April 18, it must be pretty unique. And Wrong, writer/director Quentin Dupieux’s follow-up to his cult hit Rubber, surely qualifies on that front. The movie opens tonight at the GI, and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a guy whose previous feature starred a telekinetic, homicidal car tire.
On the face of it, Wrong lays out a far more prosaic premise than its predecessor. Despondent everyschlub Dolph (Jack Plotnick, returning from Rubber) wakes up one morning to find his beloved dog Paul has vanished, and his search for the pooch sends him headlong into encounters with a gallery of odd characters and situations. But Dupieux’s not particularly interested in following this basic thread along anything resembling a conventional path.
It’s all in the approach. Like Rubber, Wrong vaults into the heady waters of surrealism from the get-go, quickly disorienting viewers in ways large and small. And where the former deconstructed horror genre tropes with absurdist glee, Dupieux’s newest does the same with indie-dramedy conventions, starting out with muted, navel-gazing prettiness before it begins fully fucking with your mind.
There’s way more going on here than just tweaking formula expectations, too. If you’re looking between the admittedly crazily-drawn lines, Dupieux’s film presents some sharp observations about the loving bond between pets and their people, the numbing relentlessness of a modern office environment, human denial, man’s quest for meaning and peace, and the universe’s staunch refusal to fully allow either. You’ll get no spoilers here, but it’s tempting to want to spill all of the strange surprises Dupieux pulls from his sleeve throughout Wrong. They come from such seemingly random places that describing them beforehand almost wouldn’t spoil actually seeing them afterwards…almost.
If Wrong is any indicator, Plotnick could stand a chance of becoming Samuel L. Jackson to Dupieux’s Tarantino. Alternating between hangdog weariness, wide-eyed hope, and sputtering explosions of emotion, the actor provides a crucial emotional anchor no matter how off-kilter things get, and Dupieux has an intuitive understanding of Plotnick’s appeal. You’re never quite sure how Dolph’s going to react when he stumbles across one of Dupieux’s surreal speedbumps, but you can bet it’ll somehow feel utterly natural. Veteran character actor William Fichtner scores the other acting bulls-eye in Wrong as a pony-tailed canine-advocacy guru with an indeterminate accent and heaps of bizarre (and frequently hilarious) platitudes.
Even at this early stage, many of Dupieux’s central themes — breaking down the fourth wall between viewers and filmmakers, jolting audiences with random acts of stylized black humor, exposing the dearth of logic in authority figures and their institutions — have solidified with staggering assurance. That distinction of sensibility could almost hurt Dupieux’s long-term prospects: He stands a chance of backing himself into a Dadaist corner if he continues to skew too close to the blueprint he’s drawn for himself.
For now, however, Wrong resides gamely alongside Rubber as one disorienting, hilarious, surprisingly moving, and howlingly funny trip. If you see one movie showcasing the repressed memories of a dog turd this year, make damn sure it’s this one.
