Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Reality Blu-ray Movie Review

Dream a little dream.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 28, 2015

What is reality? And, indeed, what is Reality? If films like Rashômon subvert the viewing experience by making the audience question what “truth” is, what should one make of a film that deliberately skews the whole viewing process from both within and without, delivering a reflective environment where various plotlines intersect willy nilly, albeit with various characters struggling to make sense of it all, a proclivity some audience members may understand only too well by the time this whimsical if deliberately obfuscatory enterprise comes to a close. Reality is an inherently cheeky title for this film for at least a couple of reasons. The film plays with ideas of what exactly is real and what (for example) is being told in a film within this film. Writer-director Quentin Dupieux, a burgeoning auteur with a number of outre efforts already to his name (Rubber, Wrong, Wrong Cops), then ups the ante by introducing a little girl whose name is Reality. Is Reality (the little girl) part of “reality” (i.e., the “story”—such as it is—of the film), or a character in the film within the film? Dupieux may seem to suggest an answer, but as with many (if not most) things surrounding this fascinating if opaque filmmaker, it’s perhaps best not to jump to conclusions. When a film has a cooking show host (who wears a giant animal outfit) approach a would be film director and claim he thinks they’re the same character, Dupieux may (or indeed may not) be offering a clue that this is a dreamscape which will elude any rationally based critique and/or analysis.

A mere laundry list of the characters in Reality and their various issues (whether “real” or imagined) may suffice to show how completely strange the film is. Reality (Kyla Kennedy) is a little girl whose taxidermist father kills a wild boar in the film’s opening sequence, and then brings the dead beast back to the family farm to gut it, at which point Reality sees a bright blue VHS videotape within the creature’s entrails. Meanwhile cooking show host Dennis (John Heder) is suffering from a debilitating case of the itches, which he claims is due to an allergic reaction to the detergent used to cleanse the completely bizarre costume he wears on set. The fact that no one else (including the audience) can see the rashes Dennis insists are covering his body only adds insult to (perceived) injury. Dennis’ coworker Jason (Alain Chabat) is pitching his idea for a horror film entitled Waves, about killer televisions, to ridiculously pretentious producer Bob (Jonathan Lambert). Bob meanwhile has his own issues with director Zog (John Glover), a filmmaker attempting to craft a film about a little girl named Reality whose father is a taxidermist who brings home a dead boar with a bright blue videotape lodged in its stomach. Pretzel “logic”, anyone?

But wait, you also get: Henri, (Eric Wareheim) the principal at the school Reality attends is a cross dressing dude who tools around in a Jeep (like you do), and who is attended to by a somewhat confused analyst named Alice (Élodie Bouchez) who happens to be married to Jason. When Jason rather unexpectedly gets the green light from Bob to go ahead on Waves, the deal hinges on Jason’s ability to get the perfect scream sound effect that will accompany visions of people’s heads exploding from the murderous televisions. None of this makes “sense” in any traditional way, and even the supposed interweaving of characters never works in any “real” way, instead segueing amorphously very much like it’s all a dream.

There have been a lot of films and television shows which have exploited which might be called a certain Lost approach, where everything and everyone is interconnected in some majestic tapestry of intent, albeit one where the “participants” can typically only see their individual “strand.” Reality intentionally subverts this very concept, providing presumed connections between the characters which Dupieux dispels almost as quickly as he presents them. These are not the connections of some Grand Design, but instead the random collisions of an almost atomic (and therefore perhaps mechanical) universe whose fleeting attempts at consciousness (and/or self-consciousness) are doomed to failure.

As such, the film is probably best appreciated as an intentionally nonsensical sequence of vignettes which have some interlocking elements but which may not actually “connect” to each other in traditional ways. Performance styles are appropriately whimsical, though Dupieux is perhaps still a bit too precious in his writing for his own good, offering interesting ideas that never end up amounting to much of anything (what is the whole deal in the producer’s office with the spilled ink, to cite just one example). Dupieux seems to want us to think there’s something incredibly profound going on in his cinematic ruminations, but one gets the increasing feeling Reality may in fact be a big screen adaptation of Punk'd.

Note: My colleague Brian Orndorf was perhaps at least a bit more positively disposed toward Reality than I am when he reviewed the film during its theatrical exhibition. You can read Brian's assessment here.

Reality Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Reality is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of IFC Midnight (a somewhat odd entity for this film, perhaps because of the perceived "horror" aspect of Waves) and Shout! Factory with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. While online data about the film is somewhat scarce, it appears this is a digitally shot feature, one that boasts a generally sharp and smooth picture. A lot of the film has been graded toward a slightly brownish-beigish side of things, an interesting choice which looks just slightly desaturated a lot of the time but which does not detrimentally affect detail and fine detail in any meaningful way. Bright outdoor scenes pop quite well, at least within the confines of the somewhat tamped down palette. Brightness looks artificially boosted in some of these same scenes though, something that tends to push highlights into clipping territory a couple of times. Detail is still generally strong throughout the presentation, offering elements like skin rashes or bristly costume fur with appropriate precision.

Reality Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Reality features an interesting and subtle DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track (largely in English, though with swaths of French with forced English subtitles). Dupieux repeatedly utilizes a snippet from Philip Glass' Music With Changing Parts, something that provides the film with an ostinati anchor that is otherwise missing in the freewheeling screenplay. Dialogue tends to be front and center, but occasional ambient environmental effects dot the surrounds. Fidelity is fine and dynamic range enjoys some spikes courtesy of elements like gunfire and screams. For the record, there's also a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix included on this Blu-ray.

Reality Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Original Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:25)

Reality Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Quentin Dupieux may see himself as a latter day Luis Buñuel, but while he may have the Spanish auteur's flair for the surreal, he hasn't yet mastered the ability to link his dreamscapes to something more patently mundane and everyday feeling, something that always helped to create the remarkable dialectic that informed many if not most of Buñuel's best films. Reality pretends that it has a lot on its cinematic mind, but it tends to ultimately come off as something of a goof, an unabashedly and unapologetically weird amalgamation of bizarre characters and storylines floating around in a sort of roiling bouillabaisse that those with a taste for the unusual will probably find fairly filling if not especially nutritious. Technical merits for Reality are generally strong, and with caveats noted, this release comes Recommended.