By Briyah Paley

Adam Sandler gets artsy. Brace yourself.

In “Punch-Drunk Love,” a new film by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia”), Adam Sandler plays Barry Egan, an odd-ball who sells decorative plungers in Southern California. Barry, a less interesting variation on the Sandler characters we’re used to, is an awkward but comedic doofus. When his seven sisters begin to mock him because he never dates, Barry kicks in a door at one of their houses and confesses to his brother-in-law that he sometimes cries.

That night, out of either desperation or boredom, Barry calls a phone-sex hotline which results in the woman calling him the next day and asking him for money. He refuses and she threatens to ruin his life. He quickly forgets about the incident and goes to work. Things take a turn for the weirder when one of his sisters introduces him to Lena (Emily Watson), a mysterious English woman who has no background or personality whatsoever.

She exists simply to serve as an obsession for Barry, who is even more interested in racking up more than a million frequent-flyer miles by buying specially-marked packages of Healthy Choice pudding, even though he’s never been on a plane. Lena likes Barry, and is more than happy to see him when he flies to Hawaii to visit her while she is on a business trip. He is also escaping some thugs who are after him because he didn’t give the phone-sex operator the money she asked for.

“You are so cute that I want to eat your eyeballs,” Lena tells Barry when they are in bed. “You are so beautiful that I want to smash your face in,” he replies, as the audience laughs nervously.

“Punch-Drunk Love” is basically a series of events that have nothing to do with each other. Anderson’s experiment to put the ever-comedic Sandler into a dark and unusual movie seems to have failed. Perhaps loyal Anderson fans will enjoy it, but for the rest of you, spend your money elsewhere.

“Punch-Drunk Love”

Opens in selected cities October 18.

The film stars Sandler, Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Luis Guzman.