Jeun-Pierre Jeunet is a terminally whimsical director, unable to help himself from pairing the cutesiest characters with the most twee, expressionist settings. Amélie is the most popular example of this but he’s also taken us to darker, more compelling fantasy worlds with Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children.
Bigbug, now available to watch on Netflix, is set in a 2040s dystopia that only Jeunet could’ve dreamt up. This bonkers sci-fi comedy may be worth your time if retrofuturism ever starts to seem too appealing to you: what about all those white-toothed AI service bots, just begging to go rogue and destroy society?
“Humans are optional”, one creepy contact-wearing bot announces, locking quirky suburban friends into their homes and sending the appliances haywire.
But all hope is not lost, since the cast is populated by loveable past collaborators of Jeunet’s: Isabelle Nanty, Youssef Hadji, and Dominique Pinon amongst others. “We’re human beings, full of emotions and sensuality”, a future-dweller proudly claims in the trailer below: “human beings will never be optional.”
This is a project Jeunet has waited a long time to realise, with only Netflix stepping up to fund such a nutty high-concept genre piece. It’s a pattern of theirs by now: bankrolling passion projects by Scorsese and del Toro among many others.
So far reviews for Bigbug have described the film as both “excruciating” and “laugh-out-loud funny”, quite a mixed bag with a 44% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Luckily, you can make up your own mind about this bizarre French Black Mirror spin right now, as long as you’re a Netflix subscriber.
