Roy Andersson’s millennial absurdist comedy, made amid the manufactured fears about Y2K, seems more suited to our desperate times. Not actually about the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it, Songs From the Second Floor looks at the diminishing returns of the Industrial Revolution, the faltering of belief systems, the collapsing of structures that sustained us. As one character frankly states about the era’s closing: “The pyramids had their day…the steam engines had their day.”

In dark and deadpan scenes that are sometimes connected by storyline but always by a comically lethargic tone, sad-sacks of every type suffer through inescapable lives. Through these vignettes, we gradually learn that the stock market has collapsed, massive layoffs have occurred, religion has provided no succor and everyone is fleeing cities by car without anywhere to go, halted anyway by massive traffic jams.

Against this backdrop we see a misbegotten magician do a trick in which he saws a man in half, unintentionally making serrated metal meet flesh. A crucifix salesman, who has gone belly up, tosses his inventory into a garbage dump. A senile plutocrat–with a very questionable political past–sits in a crib like a baby. Even the ritual sacrifice of a child, as organized religion reverts to its primal, pagan origins, is done with a perfunctory and mechanical air. Everyone knows the jig is up but no one can quite stop shuffling their feet.

Andersson, a veteran commercial director, used many of the same actors from his automobile ads in the film, and here he’s not selling internal combustion engines, but the demise of a society that can no longer survive on such contraptions. When one of his many hapless characters is cautioned that he must accept that a new dawn has arrived and changes will be drastic, he responds warily, “That will be a disaster for a lot of people.”•