THERE were no reviewers’ crib-sheets — aka press notes — available at the screening of this one-of-a-kind black comedy that introduces the eponymous bird of the film’s title, stuffed and on show as a museum exhibit in the first scene.

They may have been helpful, or not, in decoding what follows — a series of seriously surreal sketches written and directed by Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson as the final film in his award-winning trilogy “on being human.”

Narrative may be missing but Andersson’s mordant musings on human existence — the first three sequences feature death, including an effort to pass on the shrimp sandwich ordered by a dead diner to another diner — are fascinating and bleakly compelling.

Thirty-nine vignettes, ranging from meditations on historical carryings-on, lovers, a mother and child and a one-of-a-kind dance lesson led by a sex-driven hands-on instructor, basically defy synopsis.

There’s a central story of a kind featuring sporadic and idiosyncratic interventions by Nils Lowermost and Holger Andersson, salesmen who peddle vampire fangs and laughter bags.

That said, you can safely ignore the lack of conventional narrative and simply savour Andersson’s — and his eponymous bird’s — uniquely skewed view of life and death in a film that needs, and deserves, to be seen more than once.