Critic Reviews

The cast is uniformly excellent and delivers enthusiastic performances, even the ones played by puppets, and the pacing is lively and not at all boring.

If there’s one takeaway from Smoking Causes Coughing, it may be that: Life is short and illogical, and it often feels like one big joke that’s just a beat away from a punchline.

Welcome back to the zany world of Quentin Dupieux, a French director who cranks out (his previous film, the time-travel fable “Incredible But True,” came out just months ago) low-budget absurdist comedies with preposterous premises that he always takes at face value, no matter how demented. His latest might be his funniest yet.

It’s not a criticism to say that Smoking Causes Coughing doesn’t hold together, because cohesion isn’t what Dupieux is going for. He’s more about surprise and delight.

The portmanteau structure suits Dupieux’s demented sensibility, providing a wildly varied yet consistently entertaining dose of bafflement and bemusement.

The cumulative effect is very pleasurable. The film has got some Python, Douglas Adams, Charlie Kaufman and also John Waters and Ed Wood Jr in it; it’s also possible that Dupieux has seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled.

Dupieux, as ever, writes, directs, shoots, and orchestrates the madness. This isn’t as conceptually neat as Deerskin nor as playfully intertextual as Rubber, but it’s consistently fun.

It’s all so giddily bizarre, the film deserves a health warning of its own: will induce (entirely pleasurable) lightheadedness and shortness of breath.

After half a decade focusing on high-concept silliness, like the giant-fly tragicomedy Mandibles and the leather-jacket thriller Deerskin, Dupieux follows his more ridiculous impulses by letting the midnight horror anthology stay up until Saturday morning, blending gore and guffaws in an amiable, breezy comedy.

If Smoking may feel like an amalgam of leftover ideas, it finds a tenuous through line in the contagious love Dupieux imbues in the very act—and art—of bringing those fables to life.