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Imagine a comic genius, halfway between Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati and Ingmar Bergman at his most morbid. Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson is in that league. Like 2000’s Songs From The Second Floor, his new film collects together around 50 short vignettes. Several characters crop up more than once and the film is set in a single (notional) city, but there’s no dominant narrative thread, just a despair that’s grinding but frequently very funny. Scenes last anything from a couple of minutes to five times that and are mostly shot with a static camera from a single vantage point (if nothing else, the film is a masterclass in composition). Andersson’s movie reveals poetic ironies, surreal slapstick and melancholy truths, often all wrapped up together. The gloom gets a bit thick over the 92 minutes, but there are sequences here you will never forget.
