Berlin Review: Quentin Dupieux’s ‘Incredible But True’
11.02.2022 - 20:45
/ deadline.com
Everyone knows that rule No. 1 in movies — especially, but not exclusively, horror movies — is that nobody should ever go down to a basement. Not long into Quentin Dupieux’s snappy little entertainment Incredible But True, premiering as a Berlinale Special Gala at the Berlin Film Festival, a couple inspecting a house for sale is invited to descend to what the ferrety agent promises is the jewel of the property. “Oh no,” says Marie (Léa Drucker), “we’re not basement people.”
And that’s the last sensible thing she’ll say — because, of course, she and her dependable husband Alain (Alain Chabat) do what the agent tells them. Down to the basement they go. There is a trapdoor, a ladder underneath it disappears into darkness. Down again. They could never have predicted that what they discover at the bottom of that ladder will obsess Marie to the point of madness.
Alain, meanwhile, is a dealing with the multiple whims of his boss Gégé (Benoît Magimel) and a succession of catastrophes involving a power-steerage electronic penis that, along with Gégé’s car, proves to be unpredictably combustible. That basement! Going there was always going to be a mistake.
Dupieux is the sole maestro of his own personal genre, in which an unlikely object turns on an assemblage of hapless humans and creates low-budget havoc. In Rubber (2010), a homicidal tire runs riot — not an entire car, mind you, just a tire. So cheap, so easy to roll on to set! In Deerskin (2019), Jean Dujardin is possessed by the twitching evil somehow embedded in a second-hand western jacket. You just never know what might be out to get you.
Last year, the most purely enjoyable film at the Venice International Film Festival was Dupieux’s Mandibles, about a couple of petty