This droll biopic covers the life and death of Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski, whose phantasmagoric paintings, vogue-ish in the ’70s and ’80s, are reflected in that faintly apocalyptic title.

Making his feature debut, director Jan P. Matuszyński places most of the action inside a claustrophobic yet strangely labyrinthine Warsaw apartment, where Beksinski and his wife Zofia care for elderly parents and batten down for tempestuous visits from their emotionally chaotic son, Tomasz. The younger Beksinski fails at suicide but confidently survives a plane crash in one of the film’s funniest and most impressively handled sequences, pointing to the marriage of near-imperceptible whimsy and surrealism that makes The Last Family so likable. The performances really carry things, mind you, especially the contorted and turbulent act of near mime that Ida’s Dawid Ogrodnik brings to the epically self-loathing Tomasz. Like Beksinski’s often lurid images, it skirts tastelessness while somehow arousing wonder.