If you want to see a clever actor having a great time, watch Jake Gyllenhaal in the opening minutes of “Velvet Buzzsaw.”

He plays Morf Vendewalt — just one of several eyebrow-raising character names — an intimidatingly influential and improbably affluent art critic, in his element as he half-strides, half-minces his way through an exhibition hall at Art Basel Miami Beach. He trades his designer shades for boldly framed eyeglasses, turns his gimlet eye on various sculptures and paintings and drops depth-charged bons mots.

Writer-director Dan Gilroy makes the film’s contempt for the contemporary art world crystal clear from the outset, but puts Morf in an interesting position: As insufferable and pompous as he is, he has his own can’t-be-bought integrity.

He also has ambition, and is quick to exercise it. When Josephina (Zawe Ashton), the humiliated protégée of a powerful gallery owner, discovers a cache of striking “outsider art” in the apartment of a dead neighbor, she enlists Morf, now her lover, to be the artist’s biographer.

It’s here that “Velvet Buzzsaw” itself morphs. Initially a sour satire, it starts to play as if it were an expanded vignette from one of those ‘70s British horror anthology films like “Asylum” and “Tales That Witness Madness.”

Artwork turns murderous: As the grim back story of the neighbor comes to light (he killed a man! he painted with his own blood!), people pushing his work start meeting nasty deaths. Unfazed is the powerhouse dealer Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo) — see what I mean about those character names? — who imperiously stage-manages the buzz as bodies pile up.

I found the horror stylings of the movie pleasantly old-school — oh no! a painting’s wild animals are moving, and they’re coming for you! — but I wonder whether they’ll satisfy contemporary “Saw"-crazy audiences. Gilroy’s pacing is adept, and the movie creates a what-will-happen-next tension, even as he continues to lather bile on his target.

Gyllenhaal and Russo also starred in Gilroy’s 2014 directorial debut, “Nightcrawler,” an elaborate condemnation of broadcast journalism that played like an overheated cross between “Network” and “Taxi Driver.” Paparazzi and contemporary art are two topics apt to bring out sneers from Hollywood types who consider themselves too refined and clued in to be, well, Hollywood types. Nevertheless, a lecture on how the art world needs to disconnect itself from profit motive coming from a filmmaker who co-wrote “Kong: Skull Island” is pretty rich.

Still, the confident storytelling and the bravura acting — Daveed Diggs, Toni Collette and John Malkovich contribute compelling caricatures — carry “Buzzsaw” all the way home. By the end of the picture Gyllenhaal has given us something we rarely see in movies: a credible portrait of a pretentious person’s nervous breakdown.

Also, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that a couple of Gilroy’s jibes do stick their landings; one sequence in which a real corpse is mistaken for an art installation has a zing that Ruben Ostlund’s vinegary 2017 “The Square” never got within a mile of.

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“Velvet Buzzsaw” is rated R for grisly art world death and language. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.