Alain and Marie have moved to a quiet and very peaceful suburb. They didn’t really need the property, but… a mysterious tunnel they find in the cellar offers a solution to both of their fears, desires, and greatest insecurities. Are they willing to face eternity for their everyday lives to be trouble-free? Meanwhile, Alain’s boss, who strives to be macho to a desperately comical degree, is planning a visit.

In Europe, director Quentin Dupieux has justifiably acquired a reputation as an absurdist. He managed to make seven feature-length films in ten years, with Rubber (2010) telling the story of a tyre that is a serial killer, made perhaps the best film about filmmaking, Deer Skin (2019), and complemented his filmmaking with the antics of his alter ego, DJ Mr. Oizo. In film after film, Dupieux offers up satire on the format of satire. He does so in this film too, which played in competition at Berlinale – here the simplest people (which is misleading because this is the French A-list) with the simplest problems end up in Michel Houellebecq’s version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.