Directed by Roy Andersson. Rated PG. In Swedish, with English subtitles.

Gone is the heyday of visual comedy, a rich tradition that peaked in the silent era with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and then segued uneasily into modern filmmaking. At that point, being funny became more about witty dialogue than vaudevillian choreography. That’s why Swedish director Roy Andersson is such a godsend. You may know him for his uproarious films Songs From the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007). His latest is the cap on a trilogy “about being a human being”.

Andersson’s approach is purely cinematic, and he’s as meticulous a stylist as near-namesake Wes Anderson. Actors and sets are equally artificial, but the Swede’s films move at a crawling pace, creating comic tension that often erupts into hilarious gestures that point to the blurred intersection of absurdity and the mundane in everyday life.

In a series of deadpan vignettes, Pigeon follows a cast of eccentric characters through loosely connected episodes, including a pair of salesmen trying to make a buck off novelty items like whoopee cushions and vampire teeth, and a flamenco teacher who can’t keep her hands off of an unsuspecting student in the middle of dance class.

It’s more like a series of short films than a cohesive feature, but the sequences are all variations on themes of human despair. It might not sound like fodder for funny, but as Chaplin once said, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.” Pigeon certainly attests to that—think Jacques Tati meets Ingmar Bergman—with static long shots that last for several minutes each, during which every inch of the frame is used for painstaking tragicomic detail.

Last August, Pigeon won the Golden Lion, the prestigious top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a rare contemporary movie that reminds us that when it comes to jokes, the best ones aren’t spoken, they’re shown.