Written and directed by Roy Andersson, the film is striking in its insistence on a static camera that records only one shot per scene, quite often in long and extremely stylised takes. Long-serving employees are summarily fired, furniture salesman burn down their stores for the insurance money, immigrants are attacked and stabbed in full view of a passive bus queue, and brilliant sons are institutionalised because they 'write poetry until going nuts'. All these sketches are quite magnificently filmed - their horror depicted in deadpan tones, played straight for minimal emotional manipulation. The scene of tube-train passengers breaking into chorus bringing the epic non-diegetic soundtrack right into the lives of these poor lost souls is pure genius and worth the entrance money alone.

The composition and framing of each of these surreal episodes is enforced by lighting and mise-en-scène that renders people and places alike a uniform grey-green. Indeed, everybody looks decidedly ill, white face powder giving an ashen complexion to characters who are relatively indistinguishable from the 'real' zombies that begin to appear to particular characters towards the end of the picture.

And this is the film's central task; to meditate upon the relationship between the living dead of today and the actual dead of yesterday. References to lost traditions are not the reactionary musings of a simple nostalgia but rather a searching philosophical accusation that the ideals of the Enlightenment have been surrendered to such an extent that people's humanity has become defined by their resistance or capitulation to the vagaries of the stock market.

It is through the comic representation of personal calamity and the humiliations of its protagonists that the film succeeds in portraying the absurd reality of modern life. And it is in the rich European tradition of articulating the absurd that this excellent film sits: if we could imagine Kafka smiling, he'd surely be doing so now. Existential crises and the 'death of God' (vividly represented by a garbage heap of crucifixes - the result of a misguided Millennial entrepreneur) are evident in the ubiquitous apocalyptic despair. In a representative scene, a nameless governmental committee are invited to suggest a way out of 'the problem' and one respected colleague declares confidently but resignedly, 'all we can do is hope'.

And here is the central metaphysical paradox: the film presents hopeless people (read 'society' or 'civilisation') with nothing at all, except hope. The common view, whether articulated in individual disaster or communal hell, is that the betrayal of the past is complete and non-reversible.

This is most strikingly apparent in the scenes with the returned dead, whether symbols of personal guilt (debtors come back to their creditors), or collective shame (a hanged Russian Jew lost in limbo). These absences and presences point to the extremely problematic inter-generational ethical relationships that exist in contemporary Europe, and which most of us choose to continue to forget, handing a vicarious victory to the destroyers of Europe's twentieth-century.

Make no mistake, Songs from the Second Floor is not the 'coolest comedy in town' as some would have you believe, but a dark and bitter indictment upon the state of modern existence and its betrayals of the ideals of the past. The fact that it is at times hilarious and uses humour to get at the truth so effectively is just one of the many strengths of this serious and ambitious film.

Reviewed by Yoram Allon