Wrong

An exercise in shaggy-dog surrealism

Directed by Quentin Dupieux

(Not rated)

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Wrong is, if nothing else, a film you should know about,” said Alan Scherstuhl in The Village Voice. Whether you’ll enjoy it or not probably depends on your inclination to be amused by a world in which office workers can be rained on at their desks, an alarm clock flips from 7:59 to 7:60, and finding a lost dog requires seeking advice from a popular author who communicates telepathically with animals. Needless to say, writer-director Quentin Dupieux is “mining absurdity here for all it’s worth,” said Bill Goodykoontz inthe Phoenix Arizona Republic. His 2010 film Rubber handled the trick more deftly, but he’s helped immensely here by his star. Playing the hapless Dolph, who reports every day to that soggy office despite having lost his job three months earlier, Jack Plotnick wisely plays every scene straight, “even as the world around him grows weirder by the minute.” But every story needs a focus, and this one never finds one, said Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. “Rubber felt inventive, but here Dupieux’s absurdism is simply muddled, masking the fact that he doesn’t really have much to say.”