Most people who know the yellow puppet from the old Levi's ads have no idea they already know the director of one of France's strangest new films. The puppet was Flat Eric. The track was Flat Beat. The producer was Mr. Oizo, and Mr. Oizo is Quentin Dupieux, who has spent the last fifteen years becoming one of the most prolific absurdist filmmakers working anywhere. His first animated feature, Le Vertige (released abroad as Vertiginous), closed the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes on 21 May and reached French screens on 10 June. It plays like a 67-minute bad trip, and that is a compliment.
Why does a house head care about a Dupieux film?
Because the filmmaker and the producer are the same person, and the two careers feed each other. As Mr. Oizo, Dupieux put out Flat Beat in 1999, a distorted, head-nodding piece of machine funk that went to number one in the UK and sold past three million copies on the back of the Flat Eric campaign. He signed to Ed Banger Records, Pedro Winter's label, in 2006, sharing a roster with Justice and the rest of the French-touch second wave. For years he scored his own films under the Mr. Oizo name: Rubber, Wrong, Wrong Cops. The music was never decoration. It was part of the deadpan.
What is Le Vertige actually about?
A man who can see the simulation, and the friends who think he is high. Jacky, voiced by Alain Chabat, becomes convinced that reality is a video game and spends the film trying to make the people around him, his sceptical mate Bruno (Jonathan Cohen) first of all, believe their lives are secretly being rendered by a machine. To them it sounds like a paranoid theory, the rambling of someone who took something. To us it is plainly true, because we can see the blocky, glitching world they cannot. That gap is the whole film: a deadpan trip in which the one guy who has figured out the universe is also the one nobody will listen to. Écran Large called it a French Matrix that fell out of a PlayStation 1, and the description fits. At 67 minutes it is short, sharp and exactly the kind of formal prank his fans turn up for.
A producer who topped the UK chart with a puppet now closes Cannes with a bad-trip cartoon about a man who can see the simulation his friends refuse to believe in.
So did he score it?
No, and that is the twist worth flagging. The Le Vertige soundtrack is credited to Franck Lascombes, not to Mr. Oizo. Dupieux has stepped away from his own scores before: Reality in 2014 ended the run of self-composed films, and he only came back to it for The Second Act in 2024. So Le Vertige sits on the side of his work where he directs but lets someone else handle the sound, a reminder that the Mr. Oizo and Dupieux hats do not always go on at the same time.
Who actually made it look like that?
A team you could fit in a small room. Le Vertige was produced by Chi-Fou-Mi Productions and animated by five recent graduates of the Gobelins school in Paris, working in Blender, the free open-source software, with motion capture shot on an iPhone and a cheap consumer app. No render farm, no AI. The deliberately broken, low-poly look is the point: the world has to feel like a game for the joke to land, so the cheaper and more PlayStation-2 it looks, the better it works. Five graduates with a phone, free software and a budget app premiered a full feature at Cannes by leaning into their limitations instead of fighting them, and that constraint, not a big-studio pipeline, is what gives the film its uncanny, hand-built strangeness.
