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It’s confounding that Johnson ignores the book’s brutal existentialism.

But it unfolds like more recent films such as “Inherent Vice” and “Under the Silver Lake” — self-conscious takes on L.A. noir that come with extra layers of existentialism and winking commentary.

“We are gods,” a colleague insists to Cross in one of several midnight symposiums on ethics and existentialism.

Later, in a film degree program at the University of Texas at Austin, he wrote scripts about existentialism.

What it does, in practice, is lend a strange vibrancy to Dot’s back story that recalls the stop-motion existentialism of Charlie Kaufman’s “Anomalisa” in how it uses a familiar technique to unfamiliar ends.