From the brilliant mind of Charlie Kaufman comes the best film about hotel-related boredom since Lost in Translation. But with puppets.

David Thewlis voices Michael Stone, a depressed, interior, middle-aged man whose undoubtedly banal book – How May I Help You to Help Them – has made him a quasi-celebrity among customer service workers.

Michael arrives at his hermetic Cincinnati hotel – the Fregoli, named for the psychological delusion wherein the deluded person believes strangers are familiar people in disguise.

But we already realise that regardless of who is speaking – his wife, his ex-girlfriend, his son, the cab driver who picks him up at the airport – Michael hears only Tom Noonan’s voice, a quirk that serves to amplify the hotel’s emblematic crushing sameness.

Imagine Michael’s excitement when he finally hears Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a customer service wonk in town to hear him speak. Cue ungainly sex and a brief respite until the film returns to the notion that meaningful relationships between human beings are unsustainable.

At its best, Anomalisa mines the awkwardness of everyday encounters, particularly those framed by customer service. Even if they were not all voiced by Noonan, everyone in Michael's world sounds the same, and talks in fluent help-speak: the cab driver won't stop giving tourist tips and excruciatingly attempts to imitate Michael's accent ("Throw another shrimp on the barbie"). The bellboy and everyone else want to know "if there's anything else?"

We're accustomed to such sour notes from Kaufman. Perhaps it's the puppets – made using 3D imaging – but Anomalisa seems just a little bit sourer than, say, his last one, which memorably ended with this stage direction: "Die".

Those odd, little plastic faces undermine Kaufman’s penchant for dark human comedy.

Thewlis and Leigh are, unsurprisingly, excellent: his beaten drone makes a free night in a hotel seem like one of Dante's inner circles, and her sad, reedy rendition of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is a musical flip-flop to rank alongside The Simpsons reworking of Janis Ian's At Seventeen into a celebratory anthem.