The latest from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki follows Syrian asylum seeker Khaled (Sherwan Haji) as he attempts to make a new life for himself in Helsinki. Emerging from a coal freighter covered in soot, Khaled maintains that crossing the border was easy, because “nobody wants to see me”.

The second in a loose trilogy that began with his 2011 film Le Havre, Kaurismäki’s wry comedy is a timely critique of an intolerant Europe, and a winking cheer to those who offer a handshake of solidarity to their new neighbours. One such individual is the cranky but generous Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), who wins a poker game and buys a decrepit restaurant (the delightfully rubbish Golden Pint, a single painting of Jimi Hendrix adorning its otherwise bare walls) with his prize money. “I’ve always been interested in restaurants, theoretically speaking,” he admits.

It takes a while for Khaled and Wikström to cross paths, but when they do, the ensuing culture clash is drily comic. With the help of the Golden Pint’s quirky staff, Wikström sets about transforming the place into a sushi restaurant with quietly hilarious results.

“The melancholy ones are always deported first,” Wikström warns his new friend. Indeed, there’s a gloominess to the way the film looks, though there’s also a lovely, scuzzy quality too. Helsinki feels stuck in a time warp, with crap 70s furniture, cheap vodka and even a town troubadour whose bluesy riffs punctuate the droll proceedings. Haji’s Khaled is serious and self-effacing, but he isn’t pious. He is simply ordinary. Ordinary, too, is the disdain he’s met with – from the cold bureaucracy of the asylum centre to the violent treatment he receives from a gang of fascist, Finnish punks. In this sense, the film resists platitudes about immigration, aiming for something closer to tragicomic realism.