The Bothersome Man

87. A dispirited Barnesian challenge to Groundhog Day and heartily Norwegian. Half the movie is about rearranging furniture and the other half is about how you can't kill yourself once you've already died. Kafka may be perpetually relevant, and Beckett may be fashionably strange, but Jens Lien manages somehow to revisit the landscapes of their funky, supraliteral cosmos without stooping to homage, adaptation, or derivative echo. It also runs at a confident pace, commits to the principles of its own dissatisfaction, and siphons the fun from comedy by thundering its order in a cold apocalyptic humor. Norwegian, as I said. Some people are happy there.