KEEP AN EYE OUT: Surrealist Murder Mystery Mayhem

From the very first shot of Keep an Eye Out, one is aware that what one is about to watch will be, in a word, quirky. For one, the film’s oddball opening credits sequence feels straight out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with a man clad in only a red brief conducting an orchestra out in the open air. For another, the film is directed by Quentin Dupieux, the absurdist filmmaker known for films like Deerskin, in which Academy Award-winning actor Jean Dujardin (hey, remember The Artist?) becomes fanatically obsessed with a jacket made of the titular material. Indeed, while Keep An Eye Out is only a brisk 73 minutes, the storyline contains enough surrealist silliness to fill a film twice as long. A comedy that is both eccentric and efficient? Sign me up!

Bad Boys

The French title of Keep an Eye Out (Au poste!) translates to “to the police station,” and that is exactly where the film takes us following that aforementioned opening sequence. Commissaire Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde, channeling every cop show tough guy but with an extra comic touch to his gruffness) is investigating the death of a man named Chevalet, found lying in the street in a pool of blood. The only suspect is Fugain (Grégoire Ludig, who looks and acts remarkably like a Francophone David Harbour), the hapless everyman who discovered the body and inexplicably checked the body’s pockets for ID before calling the police.

It’s evening, and Fugain is hoping to leave the police station soon to relieve his increasingly distracting hunger. But Commissaire Buron will not allow him to go until the interrogation is complete. What follows is an increasingly bizarre series of events as Fugain relates what happening to him earlier on in the night he found the body — including the various reasons he left and came back to his apartment a total of seven times, such as buying bug spray to kill a cockroach and fetching a sleepwalking spouse — and struggles to wrap his own mind around the eccentric behavior of Buron and his deputy, a one-eyed rookie cop named Philippe (Marc Fraize) who won’t stop adding “actually” onto the end of every sentence.

Law and Order (or Lack Thereof)

As Fugain continues to relate what happened that night, past and present intertwine, with Buron and other characters from the police station physically showing up in Fugain’s memories to quiz him about his motivations. But to merely blur the boundaries of time and space isn’t enough for Dupieux. There are also accusations of plotting to commit murder with a protractor, an instance of eating an oyster by literally biting into the shell as though it were a rocky potato chip, and attempts to melt off one’s fingerprints with a cigarette lighter. And, as should be expected of a film with a murder mystery at its center, there’s also a healthy amount of gore, albeit portrayed in such a cartoonish way that one can hardly be disgusted by it.

The vast majority of the action takes place in a police station whose drab realism — think lots of brown and beige with a dash of mustard yellow — only emphasizes the insanity of what is going on within it; the set feels as though it could have been borrowed from any police procedural going as far back as the 1970s, while the storyline feels anything but. It all culminates in an extremely meta conclusion that contains more than a few twists and doesn’t make very much sense. But, one doesn’t need to come away from Keep an Eye Out with a firm notion of what actually just happened in order to have enjoyed its unique brand of pitch-black comedy.

Much of the film’s appeal lies in the fact that everyone involved is fully dedicated to Dupieux’s deranged style of storytelling; thanks to their delightfully deadpan performances, you’re pretty much guaranteed to spend the entire film alternating between laughing and gasping (and, in some moments, probably doing both simultaneously). As the two leads, Poelvoorde and Ludig are a perfect comic match, playing off of each other with increasing incredulity and dismay. They are well-matched by the supporting characters, including Fraize as Philippe and Anaïs Demoustier as Philippe’s cheerful wife, Fiona. It also helps that the film is so short that it is nearly impossible for it to outstay its welcome; if anything, you’ll be left wanting more.

Conclusion

In many ways, Keep an Eye Out feels more like an extended comedy sketch than a feature film. I for one had absolutely no problem with that because whatever it may be, it’s definitely entertaining.

What do you think? Are you a fan of Quentin Dupieux’s style of storytelling? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Keep an Eye Out is available in theaters and virtual cinemas across the U.S. beginning March 5, 2021.

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