Watching Lights in the Dusk, the latest feature from prolific Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, you could be forgiven for thinking someone has slipped Quaaludes to the entire cast of a 1950s noir film. Everyone moves carefully and very slowly, while the entire city of Helsinki seems to be under a blanket of silence and isolation. Indeed, apart from the film's cast, the city appears to be deserted: There are no passers-by, no irate motorists, and no nosy neighbors. Just the movie's handful of gangsters, along with the social detritus with whom they casually become involved.

The film centers on Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), a man so forgettable that, after three years in his night security job, his supervisor still asks his name when he signs out for the evening. As played by Hyytiäinen, Koistinen is aggressively Keaton-esque, both in his immovable visage and his expression of constant concern -- the worried creases between his eyes never lift. It's as if he's got secret knowledge that, any minute now, something awful will happen. And, after the first few minutes of the film, we understand Koistinen's worldview: He's greeted with instinctive disgust everywhere he goes, even by those who don't know him. Prepared as he is for constant disaster, however, Koistinen greets each new slight with nothing more than a sigh, and his only response is to make himself less conspicuous.

What makes Lights in the Dusk so wonderful is that everything in the film is extremely underplayed. Even the most hilarious, pathetic moments of Koistinen's totally unwitting downward spiral (think Detour, except without that first mistake) are played completely straight: No one cracks a smile or expresses any sympathy for his plight, and he doesn't seem to expect any. Indeed, the only character who feels anything for Koistinen -- the woman who runs the food van at which he spends an inordinate amount of time -- is the subject of his scorn every time she reaches out to him. He doesn't want pity, only to be left alone in his well-worn misery and dismay.

All of this plays out against a stylized background, full of bright colors and carefully posed tableaus. The city of Helsinki is always present -- particularly its most industrial vistas -- but within the city Kaurismäki finds pockets of pale blue walls, single carnations and deep red interiors to offset his grim story. Koistinen's apartment, for example, is dark and almost entirely free of furniture -- it feels like nothing so much as a basement corridor -- and yet its walls are painted in totally incongruous, lush colors that almost seem to be mocking their tenant. Against those walls, Koistinen's misery is heightened, and in shooting him there, Kaurismäki, a smile surely on his lips, calls to mind the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Douglas Sirk before him. Like some of the work of those directors, Lights in the Dusk is distant and cold, taking wry pleasure in presenting Koistinen's downfall with such beauty. There's a single shot late in the film -- gangsters playing cards high above the city, with their moll vacuuming in the background -- that comes as close to flawless as anything I've seen on screen all year. You want to press pause, and just sit and take it in: The colors, the humor, the light, the surfaces; the simple pleasure of watching a master at work.