A series where, like Catherine Morland, I read everything through a Gothic lens. Reply to this email to suggest other movies I could watch Gothic-ly.  

French Director Quentin Dupieux takes time seriously. How do I know that? Most of his movies are under 90 minutes long. Incredible but True (Incroyable mais Vrai, 2022) lasts 74 minutes. It is a dark fantasy comedy where you can read many Gothic themes, such as time and the ways that the weight of gendered expectations can harm you. These themes are never laboured – you don’t have time in 74 minutes, and Dupieux is a screenwriter-director who trusts his audience.   

Once again, let’s start with the house

In the Gothic, time is rarely linear, as the past constantly intervenes in the present. Think intergenerational trauma in Wuthering Heights, colonial mining in Mexican Gothic, or the way every room holds the past, present and future of its inhabitants in The Infamous Gilberts. Houses are one of the ways the Gothic shows the passage of time through ruins and decay.

The house in Incredible is a suburban pavilion that white, middle-class, middle-aged couple, Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Lea Drucker), purchase on a whim. The house has a secret revealed by the estate agent: in the cellar, between industrial pillars, there is a nondescript trapdoor. Going through this door brings you to the top of the house and propels you forward by 12 hours – while making you look 3 days younger.

As is often the case with Dupieux’s movies, the conduit is never explained. It’s not a secret since the estate agent knows about it and it is mentioned in the house deed, giving the whole thing a magical contract feel. Are there other such passages in the world? What is the magic system that enables it? Who knows and who cares – Dupieux asks us to just go with the supernatural of it all.

Gendered expectations will rot you from the inside

Marie is immediately obsessed with the passageway.  She spends her days walking through it, determined to become younger so she can become a model. In the process, she abandons her husband, but barely notices it. She has become single-minded in her pursuit of youth, as if under a spell.

Here is a fun maths problem. Assuming Marie is 45, how many times does she need to go through to look 20, and how far ahead in the future does this take her? Answer: she would need to take the passageway over 3,000 times, but in the process would waste over four years of doing nothing but go down a magical ladder. You decide if that’s worth it for the sake of a few less wrinkles.

To check that she looks younger every time she exits, Marie puts up a mirror, mirror on the wall. Between that mirror, the magical passage and Marie’s blondness, Dupieux references both Alice in Wonderland and Snow White, especially when Marie uses an apple to prove that the conduit works. She takes a rotten fruit through, and it comes out looking fresh off the orchard. But the rot hasn’t gone away, and when Alain bites into it, a colony of ants escapes. It looks like Marie has reversed time, but its flow is in fact inexorable.

Marie’s storyline is one of the few times I could have done with more information – I can accept an unexplained magical system, but I would have liked to know more about what Marie gives up. Was she obsessed with youth before walking into the house? Did she always want to be a model?

In the Gothic, there is generally some clear oppression of the female characters, embodied by the men within the novel – Catherine Earnshaw’s abusive brother, the cruel manager and treasurer at Jane Eyre’s boarding school, the husband and doctor in The Yellow Wallpaper who isolate the narrator. No concrete oppressor appears in the film, rather, audiences are left to interpret that Marie’s youth imperative comes from invisible, external forces, and Dupieux asks his viewer to guess what larger influences entrap her. Her relationship with her husband seems perfectly fine, and he never seems to regret that she is getting older. If anything, he’d rather have his wife back than lose her to the passageway. It’s not like The Substance, where Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) needs to stay young for work, fame and wealth.

By the end, like all good Gothic heroines, Marie has to leave the house. She ends up in the most Gothic space of them all, a mental institution, the only logical end to her oppressive environment. White walls, weird doctor. There, she slashes her hand with a shard of glass and ants come out, a reference to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou.  

Time will flow

If Marie and Alain’s story draws on fantasy tropes, the story of the second couple is more sci-fi. Gerard (Benoît Magimel), Alain’s boss, has recently gone to Japan to have an electronic penis transplanted (once again, just go with it). It does everything his normal dick could, although Gerard can pilot it with his phone and it doesn’t have erection issues.

Gerard is a boring cliché of a man. He is obsessed with cars – the first time we meet him, he is raving about a car skeleton in Alain and Marie’s garden –  another gendered expression made rotten. He is a serial cheater, going out with three different women in the course of the movie. He takes Alain to a shooting range where he damages his own penis. He can’t believe that Alain isn’t more interested in the possibility of an electronic dick. In the end, that penis is what kills him.

What of Alain in all this? The movie is told from his perspective. He isn’t interested in either his boss’ electronic dick or getting younger. He is content with his life – his slightly boring job with an annoying client in insurance and the mortgage he worries about paying. The final scene finds him fishing with his dog, unbothered that his wife is in a mental institution. With warm sunshine on his skin and the river flowing inexorably towards tomorrow, the one person in this movie who hasn’t gone against nature is happy.

Quentin Dupieux’s movies are mostly available on Mubi in the UK.