One of my favourite experiences in a movie theatre was during a film festival, when a feature came to its conclusion and was met with an audience combination of wild applause and genuinely angry shouting. The film was The Distance (La Distancia), a perversely unusual and strikingly original film by Spanish filmmaker Sergio Caballero. While some viewers absolutely despised it, I felt the opposite. I went out of my way to find a physical edition on blu ray so that I could watch it again.

Okay, let us see if you can wrap your head around this: from a warehouse next to an old power station in Siberia an Austrian performance artist (Vidi Vidal) hires three psychic Russian little people to undertake a heist: steal the mysterious device known as “the Distance” from under the nose of the Russian security guard, who is being distracted by a Japanese-speaking haiku-obsessed bucket of smoke that has amorous intentions towards the chimney of his nearby hut.

Clearly the standard rules of cinema do not apply here. The Distance is a comedy, but it is also undeniably arthouse, and it is ultimately a combination of the two: both a bizarrely funny exercise in intellectual masturbation and pitch-perfect mockery of the exact audience who revel in that kind of pretentious self-pleasure. I guess one half of that festival audience sort of felt betrayed by it.

The film is a pitch-perfect satire of Russian arthouse cinema. Its debt to Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly his film Stalker, is visible throughout. The Distance works on a slow build, meticulously detailing – day by day – the three protagonists’ plans to steal the titular artefact from the power station. It doesn’t really have jokes or gags. It simply sets up surreal scenes and moments so completely absurd that you wind up laughing with it.

We spend most of the time with the three psychics. The taciturn Scumeck (Michal Lagosz) is the team leader, possessing telekinetic and teleportational powers. Clairvoyant Volkov (Alberto Martínez) is the meekest of the three, with a nervous disposition and a squeaky voice. Baransky (Jinson Añazco) is actually rather creepy: he makes his debut in the film murdering a man in an apartment and stealing some inexplicable piece of electrical apparatus. He also listens to recordings of screaming women when trying to relax. All three turn up close to the power station in sedan cars with attached caravans. Their odd, bickering interactions give the movie a lot of its charm.

There is not really an explanation for anything that happens, but Caballero soaks it in atmosphere and portent, as if there is a solution to the narrative puzzle maddeningly out of reach. There is not so much a plot as a clever impersonation of one.

This is a strange movie, and appreciation of it is going to vary wildly from person to person. I adore it. This is brave, unusual, deliberately confusing cinema, best enjoyed by simply relaxing and letting Caballero’s whimsy take you on the ride, right up to the point when he playfully bites the hand that is feeding him. I have a lot of time for arthouse cinema, but I think self-awareness is at the heart of fully appreciating the genre. I think Caballero’s appreciation of it is superb.