After locating his missing penknife embedded in the chest of a fellow Metro commuter, Alphonse Tram (Depardieu) flees home and confesses the crime to his wife, who nonchalantly tosses the weapon into her dishwasher. When she is subsequently murdered by an intruder (Carmet), Alphonse embarks on a series of odd misadventures in Paris with her killer and his upstairs neighbor, seemingly amoral police inspector Morvandieu (Blier).

Blier's death-obsessed, surrealist black comedy features the ever-prolific Depardieu as a blasé drifter, who — desensitized to violence — wanders a nightmarish urban landscape with his two unlikely allies, a cop (played by the director's father) and a serial killer. Blier, who won an Oscar for his "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs," invokes every noir cliché in the book, only to subvert them all in arch Buñuel-ian fashion. Bleak, morbid, and bizarre, this is a murder mystery with no tidy solutions or evident logic. But if you're in a Kafka-esque sort of mood, feast on "Buffet Froid."