How should an audience respond when it is appealed to from the screen? The characters in Roy Andersson’s bewitchingly weird You, the Living keep asking for help from us, the watching. But we sit there – clueless or confused or dumbly captivated by what we are seeing – while they semaphore their anguish.

A Swedish comedy is a rare thing, if not an oxymoron. Andersson’s last film, Songs from the Second Floor, was a sequence of gallows skits filmed in tableaux of porridgy grey. It was very funny and very despairing. So is You, the Living, which arrives eight years later with the same style specifications. In stricken, static compositions, the fat Hell’s Angel quarrels with his girlfriend; the midlife man has a nightmare about going to the electric chair after failing a tablecloth-pulling trick at a party; the tuba player mutters aloud his money worries, in a monologue to the audience, while coitally straddled by his gasping wife; the waif-like girl dreams of living with her rock-star idol in a house that chugs train-like through the countryside.