Keep an Eye Out

If you are unfamiliar with Dupieux’s cinema of meta shenanigans, Keep an Eye Out serves as a solid starting point. For those already indoctrinated, it’s another welcome dispatch from cinema’s premier purveyor of perplexing paradoxes.

There’s not a lot of depth to Keep an Eye Out, but there is a singular vision at work and at play.

The delightfully daft, dialogue-driven result makes for a languid farce that mischievously flips a funhouse mirror on jaded audiences to welcome, if fleeting, effect.

Like a Saturday Night Live sketch that airs in the show’s final 10 minutes, Quentin Dupieux’s Keep An Eye Out tosses around ridiculous comic ideas as if secure in the knowledge that few people will ever see them.

For all that goes into making a movie—the prolific Dupieux wrote, directed, shot, and edited this one as with his previous films—the impulsive, scattered storytelling here almost feels like an unrewarding and contrarian statement to such hard labor.

It’s a mildly amusing trifle, but Dupieux has already made several of those. It’s one thing not to challenge your viewers, but another not to challenge yourself — something Dupieux has shown little interest in doing.

Quentin Dupieux imbues a trite genre scenario with a Kafkaesque brand of comic existentialism.