A dead owl half-buried in snow and squalid apartments and scarily lifeless strip clubs and forbidden, secret love and a beach littered with corpses and smokestacks billowing poison into the sky and bipolar disorder and melted ice cream and a mattress charred black by fire and bloody urine and a seven-year-old with a black eye and exploited immigrants and a slow-grinding MRI machine and a cigarette butt floating in a glass of red wine and dead children who carry their crushing guilt with them to the afterlife. Yes, this is the dour, awful world of Alejandro González Iñárritu, who never met a tragically ironic turn of events that he didn’t want to shove in an audience’s collective face. If not for the sudden, shocking appearance of a birthday cake late in the film, I’d be convinced that Iñárritu doesn’t believe a single good thing exists in this world.

Since the new film Biutiful is Iñárritu’s first film without his former screenwriter collaborator Guillermo Arriaga, there was some hope that the monotonous bleakness that typified their collaborations might be less in evidence, especially since Arriaga’s directorial debut, the utterly unwatchable The Burning Plain, made it seem like the scribe was prepared to carry that ever-dwindling dark light torch on his own. Instead, Iñárritu, who shares writing credit with Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone, has steadfastly maintained his commitment to unrelenting grimness. The pointlessly fractured chronology that was built into his previous outings is gone, but Biutiful is otherwise a tediously diligent extension of the Iñárritu brand. He manages the unlikely combination of mounting tragedy that is both wholly predictable and so absurd in its constancy that it becomes numbing. Things are sad largely in the abstract, recognizable as unfortunate circumstances but carrying no emotional impact.

As the Spanish man beset by all this fetishistic pain, Javier Bardem gives the film a level of dignity it doesn’t really deserve. In a turnaround from the usual compliment, Bardem shows the death behind his character’s eyes, the way the perpetual pall that is his existence has left him hollowed out. He doesn’t play anguish, relying instead on a sort of bereftness of the soul that manifests as a chilling stillness rather than the sort of teeth-gnashing anguish that is the usual marker of movie misery. Despite the intriguing choice, there’s actually not much room for Bardem to move within the character. Eventually the film’s colorless march defeats him too. He tries valiantly, but even a performer of Bardem’s caliber is susceptible to being submerged when the gloom is this thick.