The less you explain, the more meaningful a film is sometimes apt to become. But Jim Jarmusch’s new film contradicts that assumption. His coolly existential thriller, in which a hitman in a smart suit pursues an unknown prey, explains nothing very much and, in the end, means nothing very much either. Except, perhaps, that Jarmusch is neither Antonioni, Jacques Rivette nor Jean-Pierre Melville, to whom he seems to be bowing.

The hitman in the shiny suit is the striking Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé, who has been in Jarmusch films before. When he goes to his hotel room in Spain under strict instructions delivered to him amid some inexplicable aphorisms at an airport, he finds a naked girl (Paz De La Huerta) waiting to service him, and though he says he likes her bottom, he adds that he never has sex while on duty. He is evidently no Tiger Woods.

He has other tics. He always has two espressos in separate cups at cafés, he invariably carries a matchbox though he doesn’t smoke, and exchanges it for another one with various odd characters he meets. Inside are coded messages which he looks at and then eats. Besides that, he hardly says anything but walks and walks and walks, presumably towards his victim.

The characters he meets include Tilda Swinton in a blonde wig, John Hurt carrying a guitar, Gael García Bernal looking like a refugee from a spaghetti western and Bill Murray, who starts swearing in the absence of much else to do until he is strangled with a guitar string, still cussing.

What all this is about is problematic. The title is taken from William Burroughs, who had a thing about the control of the individual by the larger forces of society. And that is possibly the general thrust of this deliberately vacant movie.

More likely, though, the framing of its shots and its oblique look at its Spanish settings carry its meaning.

Everything is minutely planned in this respect by Jarmusch and Chris Doyle, his extraordinary cinematographer who couldn’t shoot a totally unexceptional film if he tried. But since the story stretches over two hours, one would prefer a little more enlightenment.

Jarmusch says he studied the style of the much superior Point Blank by John Boorman while making this. As it is, The Limits of Control gives off the scent of a thriller but the general odour of an art movie purposefully going nowhere.

The tagline for it is “For Every Way In Is Another Way Out”. If you understand that, you may appreciate this one more than I did.