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A middle-aged man, identified only as M (Markku Peltola), steps off the train in Helsinki, Finland, presumably having traveled there to find a job. Almost immediately, a gang of thugs robs and beats him and leaves him for dead. The doctor at the hospital where he's taken says he is dead, and so does the flat line on his monitor.

But when the doctor is called away, M sits upright, tears off his mummy wraps and walks out of the hospital. Having no memory of who he is, he makes his way to Helsinki's equivalent of Cannery Row, a vast junkyard where life's discards live in abandoned truck-size shipping containers. They live frugally and, for the most part, amiably. When a neighbor helps hook up his electricity, M gratefully asks what he can do in return. The man thinks about it for a minute and says, "If you find me facedown in a gutter, turn me faceup."

With no resources whatsoever, beyond the marginal kindness of assorted strangers, M acquires a home, a job, a jukebox, a dog, even a girlfriend. She's Irma (Kati Outinen), a seemingly dour Salvation Army worker. But looks can be deceiving. At night, alone in her room, she listens to raucous rock 'n' roll.

Their courtship is as sweet as it is droll -- just like everything else in the film. Slowly, awkwardly, M transforms himself from a man without a past to a man with a future -- a happy one, so it seems.

"The Man Without a Past" is a deadpan tragicomedy. Events take place in a benign fringe world that again suggests M may indeed be dead and that all this is a wishful last-moment fantasy like Ambrose Bierce's famous Civil War short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Everything is just slightly off-kilter. When one character asks if anyone minds if he smokes, another answers, "Does a tree mourn a falling leaf?"

At times, the movie's arcane style and straight-faced absurdity suggest Werner Herzog's mid-'70s experiment whereby he shot an entire film ("Heart of Glass") with the cast in a hypnotic trance. The characters' curious stiffness and the scenery's washed-out palette are in themselves a bit hypnotic. But despair is not the prevalent tone. Rather, the movie offers a kind of ungainly optimism. M may be a stranger in a strange land, but these natives are more than friendly.