There are many reasons for making a film, as there are for writing a book or staging a play. Most of these forms tell a story enacted by characters we care about, find funny or hate. From Homer onwards, this has satisfied a human need to make sense of our lives. Or so we are told. But what if there is no sense, or if the meanings refuse to be so neatly aligned? Beckett was not alone in spurning such comfort food. Quantum physics laughs at our tidy universe. And in the slipstream of the mainstream Roy Andersson pursues his own vision of what passes for real.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is his fifth film and the third in a trilogy – although fans of The Godfather I, II and III would hardly recognise that fact. A series of tableaux unfolds in what may be a random order (two versions of the sequence were sent to Cannes, neither of which took their fancy). Some are isolated episodes with no apparent connection to each other. Others feature people and situations which recur, making them more obviously thematic. A man in military uniform keeps missing appointments. The same platitudinous message is given over numerous phones. People behave strangely in a bar. The central characters, however are two men selling joke products (vampire teeth and the like). Their patter is downbeat and deadpan. Nothing among their samples is remotely funny. They argue with debtors, creditors and each other.

Deliberately or not, this pairing recalls Vladimir and Estragon in their dogged pursuit of something ludicrous or chimerical. Unprepossessing if not physically strange they also echo the use made by David Lynch of oddness and deformity. Andersson belongs to a tradition of film-making that draws on non-professional actors – and feeds the fantasy some people have about being ‘discovered’ and turned into a star. It would be no compliment if this director asked you to an audition.

In a way that surely is intentional, one cannot help wondering what A Pigeon is all about. The two salesmen enact a parody of business, I decide, their humourless mantra (‘we want people to have fun’) a joke at the expense of corporate propaganda. The unexpected appearance of Charles XII of Sweden followed by his return from defeat at Moscow is a comment on the futility of war. The couple petting on a beach seem suspiciously straightforward – unless the black dog sitting next to them has a darker message. According to Andersson his films address the direction society has taken, reducing our sense of responsibility towards each other; and on reading this I remember the first three scenes, each featuring indifference to someone’s death. Suddenly the director’s purpose is less obscure, my own cleverness correspondingly enhanced. We prefer things to be orderly and accessible. Solving a puzzle helps us to feel good about ourselves. But in the process something integral to seeing and remembering A Pigeon gets lost. My ‘understanding’ of the film’s ‘hidden meaning’ seems too rational and reductive. Its appeal is more elusive and instinctual, its target audience the subconscious mind.

One means by which this effect is achieved is the visual eccentricity of Andersson’s style. Colours are reduced to a bleached or ghostly pallor. The camera’s distance from events almost forbids us to empathise. And something technical about the filmstock or digital editing makes people and objects stand out in a way that feels both unnatural and familiar. The same might be said of the sets, which are self-consciously sparse and of the characters’ movements which exude the awkwardness of something learned. We seem to be looking not at our world but at an outsider’s reconstruction of it based on limited data.

Taking the director’s motives at face value, does this approach deliver a critique of modern culture or fail to transcend its weird aesthetic? Much of the humour derives from bemusement or disbelief and a woman near us laughed in a way that only be described as unhinged. There are more direct methods of making a point but these often end up preaching to the converted. Depicting the status quo as ridiculous might be the best way to stop it seeming inevitable. Andersson has produced an absurdist manifesto that haunts the memory not like a statement of beliefs but like a dream.