It's boring. It really is. O'Horten—a very slow, very Norwegian, almost imperceptibly comedic comedy—is a very boring movie and therefore I will not blame you if you are bored. However! Hear me out. Odd Horten (Bård Owe) is an aging train conductor (his life thus far a plotted course of tracks, tunnels, and timetables) facing his first day of retirement. Retirement is the opposite of a train track: It's a vast, lonely expanse of pointless possibility. Horten, for the time free and alone (his only family is a mother wiped blank by Alzheimer's), wanders along through a series of strange, snow-muffled little happenings. He loses his pipe. He falls asleep in the wrong places. He has to wear a pair of ladies shoes (how silly!). He befriends a drunken diplomat who claims, dubiously, to be able to drive while blindfolded: "Today is a beautiful day for driving blind, Horten!"

It all sounds like just another fusty, folksy movie about misspent youth ("All my friends jumped, but not me. And now it's too late"), the melancholic cuteness of old age, and the mundane terror of narrowing into an unknowable nothing. And, of course, it is. There's some clunky symbolism like when, in a rare moment of human connection, we see train cars coupling (for that matter, see also my train-tracks metaphor above). But the film's meticulous reserve—anchored beautifully by Owe's performance, which embraces oddness while absolutely refusing to goof off—turns boredom into a strength. This isn't dullness you're witnessing; it's mighty restraint. If you can submit to the glacial pace, O'Horten becomes something surreal and lovely, with the well-appointed, educational stillness of a natural-history diorama.