“Sure. Forgive and forget. But it’s like freedom and democracy. In the end, China will take over, and none of this will matter.”

The best thing about Life During Wartime is the third-rate Devendra Banhart song that plays over its closing credits. Or maybe it’s the answer Mark (Rich Pecci) gives when Trish (Allison Janney) asks him about his job as a systems analyst. Otherwise, in this quasi-sequel to his audacious and repellent Happiness, Todd Solondz is up to his same old tricks, substituting the awkward, taboo, and occasionally bleakly humorous for the substantive, insightful, or entertaining. Further, he’s at a point in his career where he’s clearly moved past plumbing the depths of human depravity as an artistic pursuit and into a phase of simply keeping up the brand. Indeed, after two lackluster projects in the interim, Life During Wartime feels like a lazy attempt to cash-in on a past success.

Revisiting a handful of characters from the earlier film with an all-new cast (Shirley Henderson, Ciarán Hinds, Michael Lerner, Michael K. Williams, Charlotte Rampling, Chris Marquette, Ally Sheedy, Dylan Riley Snyder) transposed from New Jersey to Florida, it feels oddly safe, marking out the same sordid thematic territory—suicide, pedophelia, rape, racism, addiction, passive aggressiveness, shame, self-loathing, superficiality, nihilism—but seldom approaching the same levels of provocation or sympathy, which, held in tandem, are the main selling point of Happiness. Without them, all we’re left with are a few moments of unaffected drama (mostly owing to a strong performance from Hinds as an unreformed pedophile) and discomfiting cringe humor that fail to strike the necessary balance between sincerity and satire.