WRONG (2012)

Wrong (2012)

Starring Jack Plotnick, Eric Judor, & Alexis Dziena.

 Directed by Quentin Dupieux

A Drafthouse Films Release

MPAA Theatrical Rating: None

Wrong is about a man named Dolph Springer who simply and suddenly doesn't feel right in the world. His dog goes missing. The palm tree in his back yard mysteriously changes to a pine. It rains inside his office on sunny days. His most human connection is with the girl who answers the phone when he calls to order a pizza, but even that derails into a conceptual deconstruction of the pizza company's logo. Dupieux wrote, directed, and scored Wrong and his background in music and music videos informs everything about it. His features are high on concept and slight on narrative, but they are rich with peculiar details.

The easy and dismissive take on Wrong is that it's quirky for the sake of being quirky, but Dupieux exhibits an emotional honesty in all of the absurd paces that he puts his characters through. Dolph spends his days sitting at a desk at a job where he has been fired, in an office where it rains from the ceiling but no one seems to notice and it's silly but it also feels like the truest way to reflect the droning malaise of modern office work. When a private detective shows that he can use one of Dolph's dog's turds like a security camera to see what happened  right before the dog left the yard, the scene works as both a dumb gag and an indictment on the belief that "you can do anything with technology."

Dupieux may just be having a laugh, but if so, he's doing it with a unique voice that's got my attention. Also starring Steve Little and William Fichtner -MJ