A dark comic fantasy about a suicide victim awakening to life in a seemingly idyllic city that may actually be nothing more than an alluring dystopia, Norwegian director Jens Liens’ The Bothersome Man is visionary, provocative and occasionally hilarious.

Lonely and despondent, Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvaag) leaps in front of a speeding train to end it all, but it’s only the beginning for his sensitive, tortured soul. He enters some sort of new realm in a beautiful if banal city where people spend far more time thinking about flawless interior design than messy emotions. Andreas reports to a new job that pays well and demands little. It leaves him plenty of time for eating bland food at dinner parties and having all the perfunctory sex he wants with his gorgeous new girlfriend (Petronella Barker) and the hot blond mistress (Birgitte Larsen) nobody cares he’s seeing. But Andreas is a man of passion and cool perfection is as much a burden to him as the cruel world that led to his blood on the tracks.

Making matters more complicated is that the doomed man finds a small fissure in the wall of a basement that may be a portal that can transport him back to a world of bright colors, pungent odors and complicated feelings. But no matter where it leads Andreas, it will likely lead to no good, since his utter humanness makes it hard for him to be satisfied with what he’s got, no matter what that happens to be.•