Only superfans of the humor of Adult Swimâs Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! will understand the dry-as-the-Mohave-desert humor of Reality. More an exercise in absurdist surrealism than in comedy, Reality blurs the lines of dreaming and, well, having an actual plot.
Reality opens with a little girl named Reality watching her father gut a wild boar heâs just shot. She sees a bright-blue VHS videotape among the exaggerated bloody entrails of the pig. The scene cuts to the set of a TV cooking show, hosted by a guy named Dennis in a rat costume (played by Jon Heder, most famous for his iconic role in Napoleon Dynamite) whoâs interviewing a man about making a strawberry cake, but Dennis canât stop scratching.
Then scenes keep getting more and more bizarreâEric Wareheim shows up wearing a dress and yells at an elderly man (oh wait, that was a dream!), a TV camera operator pitches a horror-movie script idea to a Hollywood producer only to go see his exact film idea finished and playing at a Sunday matinee (wait, WAS THAT a dream?), and then back to Dennis, who has a doctor tell him his scratching is because heâs having an eczema attackâON THE INSIDE OF HIS BRAIN.
Scenes start repeating, little girl Reality breaks character entirely and says, âIâm sick of this movie.â At this point, I fell asleep and started lucid dreaming about the film. If my reaction was the intent of director Quentin Dupieux (which it seems like it might be)âDupieux succeeded completely.