You didn’t know you wanted a stoner comedy about a pair of dimwitted petty criminals that discover and attempt to train a three-foot-long fly, but guess what? You do. Directed, written, photographed, and edited by cult French film director Quentin Dupieux, Mandibles is a deadpan and absurdist comedy, and occasionally offensive in the best way—you are shocked into laughter, but don’t feel shame afterwards.

Manu (Grégoire Ludig) is woken up on the beach, which is where he calls home, by a local gangster and told that he can earn 500 euros by picking up a suitcase in a town a couple of hours away and delivering it to someone else. The gangster has clearly dealt with Manu before, as he asks Manu if he is really up for the task. Manu vigorously asserts he is. He isn’t.

Manu then hotwires a Mercedes and picks up his friend Jean-Gab (David Marsais) for the ride. Jean-Gab happily leaves the gas station where he works and hops in. On the road, they hear an odd sound in the trunk. When they investigate, they find the above-mentioned giant fly. There is no explanation where the insect came from, how it got in the trunk, or why it is so large. Manu and Jean-Gab are too self-centered, dumb, or disinterested to care.

When Jean-Gab gets the idea of training the fly to rob for them, the film takes off. Or meanders, really, or seems to. The plot moves from one circumstance to the next, all in a lackadaisical pace, but the comic timing of the leads is sharp as a razor. They eventually end up at the house of a young woman, Cécile (India Hare), who mistakes Manu for a long-lost friend. Manu and Jean-Gab capitalize this and are invited to stay at her vacation home. The problem is, of course: How do you hide a fly the size of a golden retriever?

Here, they meet their main antagonist, Agnès (a superb Adèle Exarchopoulos). Agnès has had a skiing accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury that forces her to speak at the highest volume possible—no matter the subject—which is a lot funnier than you think it would be. However, Agnès’s real challenge is that she’s a stickler for rules. She scolds the boys for starting their meal before the hostess does and becomes upset when she believes they are harboring a dog.

Agnès represents the classic Ted Knight/William Atherton roles in Bill Murray/Harold Ramis comedies. She’s the voice of hypocritical authority and its useless rules. This sets Agnès up for ridicule from the start. Exarchopoulos gets so much mileage from the voice alone that you don’t see what else is up her sleeve. Agnès flusters Manu and Jean-Gab because she has their number well before anyone else. She knocks the plot into hyperdrive and transforms the stoner comedy into a bit of a screwball farce.

And of course, there is still the fly, which is the most adorable manifestation of an insect you will see on screen. In honor of the ramshackle quality of the film, Dupieux chooses to use an animatronic puppet as opposed to CGI. Jean-Gab even names the fly Dominique, treating it as a pet. Dominique really doesn’t stand in as a symbol for anything. It’s more like a MacGuffin. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a fly is just a fly.

With any buddy film, if there is no chemistry, it’s all for naught. Ludig and Marsais have been a successful duo for a decade, and their chemistry is undeniable. They have a stoner’s sense of comedy, in which they are deliberately one beat behind, so the timing seems just a little off, but when they drop their load, it’s always right on target. One running gag is that whenever some sort of good fortune or circumstance comes their way, they have a celebratory handshake they call “Toro.” Or, kind of a handshake. Practically every circumstance includes a “Toro,” and by the end, you have a Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors amount of them, each funnier than the last.

In the end, there is a moment when the two are essentially exactly where they started, when Manu states, “True wealth is friendship,” and that’s the heart of the film. It tempers everything else and lifts it above other buddy comedies that rely on vulgarity or simply try to do too much. Cannily made, Mandibles is a sweet, short, deeply funny movie, and one of the brashest films of the year.