Lars von Trier has a problem with authority, especially when it's his own. The man who concocted (with fellow Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg) the sadomasochistic restraining device otherwise known as the Dogme 95 manifesto has returned with a film that reeks even more of the contempt he feels for his occupation and for himself.

Ostensibly a workplace comedy, The Boss of It All may be most remarkable when regarded as a 99-minute mea culpa in which the director attempts to atone for his crimes against the acting profession... while, of course, remaining an incorrigible showboat about it all. We expect nothing less from the man who bullied and tormented Björk on the set of Dancer in the Dark until she was so enraged, she tried to eat her own costume. In Dogville Confessions, Sami Saif's documentary about the making of von Trier's 2003 blame-America epic Dogville, Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany look like they'd rather boil him alive.

Like those of the controlling yet cowardly Ravn (Peter Gantzler), his surrogate in The Boss of It All, von Trier's people skills are less than ideal. Surely, more than a few people felt a twinge of schadenfreude at the recent news that the 51-year-old filmmaker's battle with depression has caused him to doubt the future of his career. If The Boss of It All turns out to be his last feature, then it'll be a fitting capper for the most ingenious, frustrating and pig-headed body of work by any contemporary director. That it's also his funniest movie is a definite plus.

This comedy of errors derives from Ravn's need to hire an actor to portray his IT company's boss, which he invented to use as a scapegoat for any decision that would have made his employees love him less. The fictional president must be made flesh in order to aid in the company's sale to a permanently incensed Icelandic businessman (hilariously played by Icelandic auteur Fridrik Thor Fridriksson). A dim-witted and pretentious thespian with a meagre capacity for improvisation, Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) instead wreaks chaos among Ravn's charges, most of whom have been turned into quivering neurotics by their real boss's devious machinations.

The parallels between Ravn's passive-aggressive reign of terror and the real-life head games von Trier plays on his casts would be obvious even without one character's wry reference to “a Dogme film.” The director's opening claim that his latest feature is “not worth a moment's reflection” – uttered in one of several mock-Brechtian interjections – is disingenuous for several other reasons, too, especially von Trier's decision to limit “human influence” by using a computer to randomly decide when to pan, zoom or tilt the camera. (Ever the wise-ass, he dubbed the process “Automavision.”) The resulting disdain for the usual rules of framing and continuity gives the movie an appropriately nervous kind of energy, provided you don't mind that the characters' heads are frequently cut off by the top of the frame.

Such tactics will undoubtedly aggravate von Trier's playa haters, though it's an interesting question to the rest of us whether the director – as Kristoffer's ex-wife says of the hapless actor after she's learned of his predicament – “has a knack for deliberate mental cruelty,” or if (as Kristoffer describes himself) he's “better at being irritating on an intuitive level.” But despite his best efforts, von Trier fails to prevent this perverse self-portrait from being as entertaining as it is maddening.

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