Quentin Dupieux Delivers a Winningly Idiotic Anthology in Smoking Causes Coughing

For a moviegoing culture wheezing for oxygen—our cinematic alveoli coated with the thick layer of tar naturally occurring when you consume three Marvel movies a year (and a couple DCs, but only if you’ve been drinking)–there is only one recourse. But quitting superhero movies cold turkey seems hard, so French absurdist Quentin Dupieux has generously provided a nicotine gum for the spandex-addicted: Smoking Causes Coughing. After half a decade focusing on high-concept silliness, like the giant-fly tragicomedy Mandibles and the leather-jacket thriller Deerskin, Dupieux follows his more ridiculous impulses by letting the midnight horror anthology stay up until Saturday morning, blending gore and guffaws in an amiable, breezy comedy.

The Tobacco Force, a supergroup of “avengers” empowered by carcinogens, composes the film’s framing ensemble. A Power Rangers-like tokusatsu parody, they are like Dupieux’s Danger 5—a retro satire of form that revels in how desperately adult so much of its juvenile source material is. Where Danger 5 made running gags of the sexism and repetitive plotting of the spy/adventure serial, Smoking Causes Coughing utilizes eye-popping colors and frequent splashes of blood for its heroic team.

It’s a tough time to make even a caricature of the genre. It’s saturated pop culture so deeply that we’re already growing tired of all the R-rated superhero riffs. But Smoking Causes Coughing avoids repeating The Boys or The Suicide Squad’s self-aware jabs at skin-tight costuming, empowered immaturity or mad villain plots by avoiding awareness altogether. Instead, it leans into the low-fi pulp aesthetic of cheapy TV and the bumbling clownishness particular to Dupieux’s brand of comic incompetence. The Tobacco Force isn’t a superhero team cleverly taking the piss out of superhero teams. This is a superhero team so inherently stupid that its idiocy powerwashes your brain, scrubbing away all the normalization that blockbusters have worked tirelessly to achieve. You’re returned, freshly blasted by buffoonery, back to square one, when this all seemed harmlessly stupid instead of all-powerful.

Harmless stupidity is where Dupieux thrives. Smoking Causes Coughing plays to these strengths, being both sublimely silly and unpredictably, addictively light. The comedy flows into and out of its nested stories without a care in the world, feeling like a loose showcase for all the goofy, horror-adjacent ideas Dupieux had over the pandemic.