Absurdist filmmaker Quentin Dupieux filmed Yannick on the sly. He wrote it in six days and filmed it in secret. Yet it certainly doesn’t look like it. The camerawork is smooth, the editing is sold, and the acting is very, very good. The problem is an anemic script that doesn’t capitalize on its promising setup.

It begins with an audience watching a play, Le Cocu, a clearly mediocre French farce. Slight chuckles emanate from the audience, but there is one member who becomes more and more uncomfortable: Yannick, a young parking lot attendant. He eventually interrupts the play with a complaint that he travelled very far and has not been entertained. To prove the point that anyone can write a better play, he pulls out a gun, demands a computer, and writes one himself while holding the rather placid audience and the irritated actors hostage.

One would hope for a clever satire perhaps or a tension-filled drama, but to no avail. This is as straightforward a premise as Dupieux has ever attempted. It spools out with confidence, but not a whole lot of forward momentum. In fact, after Yannik interrupts the performance, he delivers a lengthy monologue. Eventually, when he hands the actors the pages he wrote, and they start arguing over it, we are thrilled to have something resembling character interaction.

Not that the film is static. Dupieux knows his craft, and is the force behind Mandibles and Smoking Causes Coughing, two of the weirdest and funniest films of late you are likely to see. The problem is the anemic script, which feels like a writing exercise or a first draft. Save for Yannick and the lead stage actor, Paul, played with anxious and charisma by Pio Marmaï, everyone else is paper thin and forgettable.

This being a Dupieux film, there are moments of humor that work, as when the actress hesitates on acting out the play Yannick has written because it takes place in a doctor’s office rather than the kitchen, which is the set onstage. That she has a gun pointing at her doesn’t seem to affect her attitude. Or the moment when a theater employee single-handedly wrestles a large printer down a flight of stairs.

Yannick (an impressive Raphaël Quenard) basically represents the working class, so working class that he doesn’t seem to understand how to operate a laptop. Meanwhile, the actors and, to a lesser extent, the audience are the bourgeoisie. They make fun of him or laugh at him. So, there’s a class interplay, but also one between Yannick and the theater’s spectators as he charms them, which infuriates the professional actors. So, there is food for thought and meat on the bone. Yet it just isn’t enough or doesn’t go deeply enough. The premise can’t sustain its paltry 67-minute running time, and the pace sags when the camera focuses on Yannick slowly typing out his play. It’s all surface and lacks the underlying shaggy dog sweetness that underpins Dupieux’s other films.

Ultimately, Yannick feels like an experiment.