I have a new favorite absurdist movie: The Man Who  Climbed Out  the Window and Disappeared. This Swedish farce, adapted from the book by Jonas Jonasson, was a huge hit in its home country, then proceeded to take the rest of Europe by storm.

It didn’t make much of a splash here in the U.S. (yet), but of course movie studios were falling all over themselves to get the rights to it and they will, of course, make it with American actors and adapt the script where it will never be as good as the original.

I saw it on Apple TV, but I’m sure it’s rentable all over the place.

Anyway, on to the movie.

The premise is, on his 100th birthday in a senior-care facility, Allan Karlsson just gets up and leaves the facility, picks up a suitcase full of ill-gotten drug money, and is chased by those tasked with recovering the suitcase and the money intact.

Sounds like a typical Hollywood formula movie, huh?

Not so fast.

It gets weirder and funnier. The 100-year-old man runs into a bevy of odd–but lovable–friends, experiences some very funny flashbacks where he plays pivotal historical roles with Franco of Spain, Robert Oppenheimer at the Manhattan Project, and even runs into Albert Einstein’s dim-witted brother, Herbert. Along the way, Allan blows up a lot of Russian nesting dolls, bridges, a treacherous local merchant urinating in a field, and even a ravenous fox that that kills his favorite cat, Molotov. And the bad guys (and a few good, but misguided ones) die in scenes that had me roaring with laughter.