Songs from the Second Floor is certainly not the apocalyptic near End of the World sf film some reviewers seemed to see it as. There’s an inexplicable perpetual traffic jam – an image that was far better crafted into a vision of social breakdown in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) – and the Terry Gilliam-like image of a horde of civil servants running through the streets flagellating one another. But this a vision of social downfall does not make. There are ghosts and a reasonably effective scene where we realize one person that Lars Nordh is talking to on a station platform is really a dead business partner. You can sort of see all this parable about the weight of the dead, but it still feels more like a load of weighty claptrap that has been read in over a slim and rather vague aspect of the plot.

Indeed vague and slim are really words that could be used to describe the whole film. There is no real plot – just several vignettes and interwoven fragments of stories, but most of these never amount to much. The film was directed with every scene shot in a single camera set up with no cuts – an effect that is somewhat dramatically distancing. There’s a lurking sense of black humour – the magician’s trick of sawing a person in half that goes wrong, the man who has just been fired refusing to let go of his boss’s leg as he is dragged down the hallway. But the film needed to push these scenes much further. There’s a scene with a military centenarian who is being read an official commemoration and in the middle of it suddenly says “Give my regards to Goebbels” and gives a Nazi salute – and you keep expecting the scene to burst out into something really blackly funny as the greeters try to ignore what is going on. Only it doesn’t. The whole film really needed to come out somewhere near the hysterically deadpan blackness of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom (1994) to make this work. Instead it’s a piece that sits at an oblique distance. Nothing really emerges in terms of humour, drama or anything. This is one arthouse exercise that seems impossibly overrated.

Director Roy Andersson next returned with You, the Living (2007), which likewise offered up several plotless vignettes, each of which were shot using only a single camera set-up. This is a better film than Songs from the Second Floor, although its surrealism does no broach the overtly fantastic.