‘Big Bug’ Review: Jean-Pierre Jeunet Demonstrates the Perils of Total Creative Freedom

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticAs the first film from the director of “Amélie” in nearly a decade, “Big Bug” is kind of a big deal.

Sadly, it’s also a big disappointment — easily the most obnoxious Netflix original in some time, owing to the company’s trust in a director whose overactive imagination demands some kind of boundaries.At precisely the moment pandemic-confined audiences want to get out and breathe fresh air, Jean-Pierre Jeunet gives them a suffocating scenario in which a squabbling French family is trapped in their retro-modern home with several android assistants.

The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future — one in which all the houses look exactly the same on the outside, but are maintained by eccentric AI indoors (where the film spends 98% of its time).

In “No Exit,” Jean-Paul Sartre surmised that “hell is other people.” In this zany sci-fi riff on that idea, the tortures of lousy company become all the more acute when you throw in a few robots.Locked together when this glitchy smart home’s automated doors refuse to open, the off-putting and clearly incompatible human characters consist of exasperated divorcée Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) and oblivious new beau Max (Stéphane De Groodt), stuck with ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and the nitwit secretary (Claire Chust) for whom he dumped his wife, all crammed indoors with their busybody neighbor (Isabelle Nanty) and two slang-spouting teens (Marysole Fertard and Hélie Thonnat).