Cannes 2026: Le Vertige Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Cannes International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Writer-director Quentin Dupieux’s absurdism strikes the festival once again, this time with two films. While audiences might be drawn to his star-studded English-language film, ‘Full Phil,’ playing in the Official Selection, he also closes out the Director’s Fortnight with his first animated film, Le Vertige. Clocking in at a breezy 67-minute runtime, Dupieux makes optimal use of his zany concepts once more in all its meta-satirical essence.

Dupieux’s filmmaking formula is undoubtedly an enticing model to utilize. Developing peculiar concepts on a tight budget with a compact runtime has allowed him the opportunity to double his filmography since 2020. This being his third time that he is releasing two films in the same year, Dupieux shows zero signs of stopping any time soon. However, your interest in his projects will hinge on two factors: whether you can immediately embrace the outlandish concept presented to you, and whether you’re on board with it being stretched out to its limits. Fortunately, Le Vertige is the outcome of Dupieux’s most intriguing concept yet. The first characteristics noticeable to viewers are certainly the crude animation and simplistic font to exhibit his concise formula in animation form. Evidently inspired by animation from early 2000s video games like ‘The Sims’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto III,’ Dupieux never allows these antiquated influences to relegate his distinctive filmmaking style. 

When Jacques (Chabat) tries to convince his friend Bruno (Cohen) that they are living in a simulation, they venture out to expose and exploit the bugs that are ever present throughout their world. Dupieux fully maximizes this process by showcasing the limitations of this crude animation while jesting it through his witty screenplay in the interactions between Jacques and Bruno. Chabat and Cohen proficiently executing Dupieux’s witty dialogue behind their deadpan life-like animated models becomes the key contributing success for this absurdist world, aided by Franck Lascombes’ eccentric score. Dissimilar to his previous work, this film develops a much deeper world that allows for thematic ideas to be addressed adequately enough to align comfortably within its short runtime as Jacques and Bruno aim to find purpose behind their significant discovery.

Overall, Dupieux’s filmmaking formula translates tremendously well to his first animated film, allowing the deliberately crude animation, witty dialogue, and eccentric score to carry this absurdist world in a compact runtime.

still courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

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Costa Christoulas

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