Anders Thomas Jensen is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, director and veteran of the Dogme 95 years at Denmark’s Zentropa Studios. He now brings us this slapstick-violent black comedy and shaggy dog story of gruesome silliness. It is well acted but relentlessly and bizarrely unfunny. So unfunny as to be almost funny, but not really, in that the unfunniness approaches the condition of being itself a joke, though without really arriving. It could be that the spectre of Zentropa’s dark master of the prank, Lars von Trier, is hovering somewhere in the corner of the frame.

Mads Mikkelsen is cast against type as nerdy loser Manfred, an abuse survivor with learning disabilities whose tough-guy brother Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) robs a bank. Before being arrested, Anker gives poor twitchy Manfred the key to the railway station locker where he has stashed the loot, and tells him to get the cash once the cops have gone and bury it in the woodland behind their old family home where their dad used to brutalise them.

But when he gets out of jail 15 years later, Anker finds that Manfred has retreated into a delusional state, believing himself to be John Lennon, and is too upset by everyone disbelieving him to remember where he buried the money. So Anker, with the help of a rogue psychiatric nurse, has to round up three other dysfunctional cases who variously believe themselves to be Ringo, Paul and George so he can reunite the band in the remote Danish forest for a couple of numbers, in the hope that Manfred will chill out sufficiently to remember where to start digging.

It’s admittedly a funny premise but executed wearyingly: I laughed at Mikkelsen’s crazy physical comedy at first before realising that the film consists of almost nothing other than a kind of goofy, humourless violence. Jensen has many skills as a film-maker but comedy is frankly not one of them. Sofie Gråbøl does her best as a martial arts enthusiast who now owns the boys’ family home.