Mandibles movie review & film summary (2021)

The reason the dim-bulb duo stole the car is because Manu—first seen sleeping on the beach, the tide rolling in around him—gets a job. Can he carry a briefcase to a mysterious man and hand it over, without ever looking inside? Manu thinks he can. But first he has to steal a car. And then he has to loop in his friend Jean-Gab. Jean-Gab has nothing else going on so he’s down for the adventure. The two clearly go way back, as evidenced by their constant catch-phrase-gesture—making heavy metal bull horns with their fingers, interlocking hands, and saying in unison, “Toro!” “Toro” works no matter the situation. It’s how they connect, commiserate, celebrate. When they feel a repetitive vibration from the car trunk, they pull over and discover the enormous fly, staring up at them with gigantic red eyeballs. Normal responses do not apply. Manu and Jean-Gab get the bright idea to ditch their original mission, and instead train the fly to be their own personal bank-robbing drone.

What works so well in “Mandibles” is how it’s set up as a basic heist movie, using very familiar elements, so familiar they’re almost tired cliches, before going completely off the rails into random demented territory. Dupieux likes to start with an outrageous situation, and then follow it wherever it takes him, anchoring it all in the familiar. Consider his film “Rubber” (2010) featuring a tire as a murderous sentient entity, or “Deerskin” (2019), where a man (Jean Dujardin) becomes unhealthily obsessed with his jacket made of deer skin. Dupieux doesn’t develop these ideas so much as present them, reveling in the various possible outcomes of such a weird event. He seems to start with a question: “What would happen if … ?” His films can seem like one-trick ponies, repeating the same joke over and over, but there’s something refreshing and also humorous about Dupieux’s outlook, a mish-mash of Dada and Eugène Ionesco and Franz Kafka, with some Salvador Dalí thrown in; he creates a space out of the banal and everyday where unexplainable things happen, where inanimate objects take on intelligence and agency, where two dumbbells see a giant fly and their first thought is: “She would make a perfect drone. We’ll be rich!”

If there is a correct choice to be made, Manu and Jean-Gab have never heard of it. Their training sessions with the fly (whom they christen Dominique) are interrupted by a cascade of easily avoidable disasters. Eventually they are picked up by a carload of people, one of whom, Cécile (India Hair), thinks Manu is a guy she knew (and slept with) in high school. Manu goes along with this, leading to farcical almost slapstick moments where he is unable to follow her down memory lane. Cécile: “‘Member when we fooled around in high school? You came in two seconds.” Manu, who does not remember, because it wasn’t him, says, “You too.” Cécile’s group of friends look on the raggedy interlopers with suspicion. “Mandibles” lingers here for a long while, milking the jokes (to some success) and allowing the mysterious briefcase mission to disappear in the rear view mirror.