(Cert 15, 106 mins): Starring Jason Schwartzman, Jude Law, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts. Directed by David O Russell

Existentialism might not seem a subject that immediately lends itself to belly laughter.

Yet it's as an existential comedy that David O Russell's new film is being billed.

With three films already under his belt, including the box office hit Three Kings, has the writer and director taken leave of his senses?

The plot, undoubtedly, does sound a little bizarre.

Noticing a series of strange coincidences, environmentalist Albert Markovski (Schwartzman) hires Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Hoffman and Tomlin), a pair of existential detectives whose job is to investigate metaphysics rather than the more mundane murder mysteries with which more traditional private dicks waste their time.

In the course of the investigation, they meet golden boy Brad Stand (Law) and his girlfriend Dawn (Watts), with Brad then adding another twist by also hiring the detectives for a little investigation of his own.

When Markovski starts to lose faith in the detectives' findings and teams up with firefighter Tommy Corn (Wahlberg) and the Jaffes' philosophical opponent, Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), the scene is set for a chaotic journey through the fundamental questions of existence.

It's a fairly absurd scenario, ofcourse, but that's almost beside the point. It's simply a device to set up between two opposing schools of philosophical thought.

One represented by the existential detectives, holds that all life's events are in some mysterious way connected and happen for a reason.

The other, led by French philosopher Caterine, believes that life is a meaningless series of unrelated events.