At first glance, the central message behind Swedish director Roy Andersson’s drama You, The Living seems to be that we, the living, don’t have a whole lot worth living for. Not the overweight drunk who’s too busy complaining about her life to notice how much worse she’s making it; not the tuba player who’ reduced to playing funerals in order to make ends meet; not the young groupie infatuated with a rock star who rejects her; and not any of the other assorted sad sacks whose mundane lives Andersson puts on display in this 95-minute series of vignettes. Yet there’s an underlying beauty beneath each of Andersson’s carefully framed, single-shot scenes—which wonderfully capture the essence of humanity’s day-to-day struggle with simple existence. Equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming, You, The Living is intentionally light on plot and character development, and it certainly doesn’t offer much in the way of optimism. (The one glimmer of hope—that “Tomorrow is another day”—is uttered by the bartender after he announces last call.) What it does provide, however, is an introspective look at the nature of those who resignedly plod their way through lives that some viewers might realize aren’t too far from their own.