Michael and Lisa in Anomalisa (Paramount Pictures)

It’s tough to digest a film written by Charlie Kaufman right after you have seen it. Even the more accessible ones are enigmatic: Being John Malkovich (involving a portal into actor John Malkovich’s mind) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Jim Carrey erases all memories, literally, of his relationship with Kate Winslet after she does so first. But in all of his works, there is a rich ocean of emotion, always turbulent and overflowing with dread and wonder.

His first directorial effort was the somewhat impenetrable Synecdoche, New York (that’s not a misspelling), in which the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman disintegrated before our eyes while he directs a colossal stage production that never happens. And now Kaufman has, along with Duke Johnson (who directed an astonishing Claymation episode of the late NBC comedy Community) created a stop-motion animated film about…

This is not the easiest film to describe. Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) travels to a conference in Cincinnati to give a speech based on his book on how to be a good at customer service. He stays overnight at a hotel, tries to reconnect with an ex-partner, and doesn’t really know what to do with himself. Then at the hotel bar, he hears a new voice—a woman’s: Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a customer service rep in town to hear him talk. They connect. They have a night together.

Ostensibly it’s about what happens when someone is yearning and aching for something else in life, a new spark, anything that will make life not so absolutely abysmal, as in the best of Kaufman’s screenplays—and make no mistake, Kaufman is a bona fide talent. The movie’s also very much a surrealist masterpiece in the sense of mixing a very odd sense of reality with dream logic (and an actual dream sequence as well) into an extremely heady mixture.

One of the things that makes Anomalisa odd is that Tom Noonan performs the voices of “Everyone Else” (this is how it’s listed in the end credits). It is significant that the story is seen through Michael’s perspective, so when he first arrives in town, a fellow passenger and a cab driver have a similar sounding voice, but it’s easy not to think about it much, despite the quirky dialog that you’d expect from Kaufman.

But then the female characters—Michael’s wife and his ex-lover in Cincinnati—are voiced by Noonan, too, and it turns out everyone has the same, slightly monotone male voice. That is, until Lisa comes into the picture. (Why she is the only one to have a different voice that stands out is a mystery I simply wouldn’t dare  to breakdown.) Kaufman’s real goal is to reveal and revel in what is so joyous about making a genuine, awe-inspiring connection with someone new and what happens if that attraction starts to fade. It also must be mentioned how phenomenal Thewlis and especially Jason Leigh are. It’s fascinating to see Leigh in this and then in the upcoming The Hateful Eight playing completely different characters, but both infused with pain and suffering.

Few movie romances have touched me as much as the interaction between Michael and Lisa, mostly because of the mystery and the genuine sense of seeing something that’s different. It’s also an R-rated animated film, a rating that’s actually well deserved, but unlike a silly Team America: World Police puppet show, the adult Anomalisa has real intimacy.