Critics reviews

A wildly inventive anthology, Smoking Causes Coughing skips between zany plot ideas as the Spandex-wearing heroes, sojourning in the countryside as part of a team-building exercise, swap campfire tales.

Madder than a bag of cats. Quentin Dupieux’s latest is even more absurd — and more pointless — than his film about a sentient car tyre. But it’s cheering to know he is still being allowed to make this sort of bollocks.

If Smoking Causes Coughing is easy on the eye, it’s even easier on the brain, blithely tripping along Monty Python-like from incident to incident without requiring the audience to remember much in the way of character motivation or plot... It’s all so giddily bizarre, the film deserves a health warning of its own: will induce (entirely pleasurable) lightheadedness and shortness of breath.

Dupieux has put together something chaotic, disparate, entirely negligible yet oddly gripping and also funny.

The promise of a movie whose star Avengers tout progressive values while downplaying their corporate backing is real, but expecting a director whose greatest gift is his lack of attention span to actually follow through is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kudos to Dupieux for making movies mostly to amuse himself and the loyal, curious viewership that’s on his wavelength. For everybody else out there, no harm done.

Smoking Causes Coughing is as barking mad as you’d expect from the man behind 2020’s Mandibles... and last year’s Covid-delayed Incredible But True... The portmanteau structure suits Dupieux’s demented sensibility, providing a wildly varied yet consistently entertaining dose of bafflement and bemusement.

The sheer irreverence of everything here, starting with a Grand Guignol shower of guts and ending on one hell of an existential question mark, is more than enough to cause serious giggling fits.

Smoking Causes Coughing is a bit like reading The Canterbury Tales while being completely unaware that you’re reading The Canterbury Tales, if that makes sense (it might!).

“Smoking Causes Coughing” moves unhurriedly from moment to moment, which makes its perpetually strung-out jokes even funnier.

The director has assured “Smoking Causes Coughing” to be, oddly, his first film to be actually connected to reality. It’s also an easygoing piece of entertainment that lightly riffs on and spoofs the familiar cheese of Marvel and DC IP. He’s playing with the genre while also flexing its tropes to reveal their inherent ridiculousness.

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... Dupieux is going to do what Dupieux is going to do. God bless him.

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.