The opening credits may prattle off stills of beasts in the wild – lions, zebras, cheetahs and the like – but they’ve got nothing on the deliciously devious Argentinean anthology (and 2015 Best Foreign Film nominee) "Wild Tales" and its cast of civilized animals, their claws all out and bloody for revenge. And as the famous phrase goes, revenge is a dish best served six times and mercilessly. Or something like that.

The prologue nicely sets the table for the feast of fun-size razor blade-filled candy bars to come. On a flight, two passengers – a music critic and a model – make tepidly flirtatious banter before they realize they both know the same guy: Pasternak. Another passenger chimes in; she knew this Pasternak fellow too. And so did the guy behind her and the guy behind him, and the chain reaction keeps going all the way to cockpit, where the black-hearted punch line sits.

Considering current headlines, the timing for a dark comedic short about a mentally unstable pilot could not be worse. But that’s not the movie’s fault (it’s been out nationwide since February, well before the Germanwings tragedy) and other than that, it’s a perfectly bitter pill of a segment, with writer-director Damian Szifron cleverly turning the mundane into murder on an unpredictable dime.

Szifron keeps that amusingly twisty and twisted sensibility going into "The Rats," where a slow night at a diner boils over when a waitress is forced to serve a condescending gangster-turned-politician from her tragic past. The short is probably the weakest of the bunch; the ending stumbles to the finish, writing itself into a bit of corner and escaping with the help of a chaotic bloody copout. That said, it’s still a funny and tense little number, with plenty of Szifron’s vicious barbed wire turns. 

The scathing hilarity picks up with "The Strongest," the most epic road rage battle this side of the "Mad Max" franchise. A wealthy guy flying down the highway runs into a slow junker pick-up that won’t let him pass. The former eventually gets around the pesky truck, hurling some profane names and leaving him in the dust … until karma, feeling particularly vindictive, flattens one of his tires, giving the pick-up and its offended driver plenty of time to catch up and return the favor – only with a crowbar and some hearty turds.

Somehow their tense, wickedly entertaining war continues to escalate from there, with Szifron turning the duo into two real-life rival Wile. E. Coyotes (complete with a cartoonishly desperate attempt to blow out a fuse) intent on ineptly destroying one another and themselves in the process. The great final darkly absurd joke cements the two as brothers in spontaneous mutual combustion.

The collection’s delightful plummet down the rabbit hole of madness hits terminal velocity with "The Strongest" and keeps up that high speed all the way to the end credits. "Bombita" sets a bomb technician (Ricardo Darin, the star of the 2010 Best Foreign Film winner "The Secret in Their Eyes") against an evil that transcends borders and language: the DMV. His increasingly maddening battle against the uncaring world of bureaucracy plays almost like a quick shot of Coen Brothers – save for the ending, which hits a subversively heartwarming note. Call this one "DMV for Vendetta."

Enjoy that brief spat of sweetness while you can, because the next short, "The Proposal," is "Wild Tales" at its most amusingly mean and vicious. The son of a wealthy family kills a pregnant woman in a hit-and-run. The clan’s solution: pay the groundskeeper to play sacrificial lamb. However, as corrupt lawyers and police get involved in the negotiations, the frustrated father isn’t so sure his son’s innocence is worth the bloating price tag.

It’s a diabolically black-hearted dip right into a money-corrupted amoral alcove (considering all the segments, it feels safe to say the writer-director has an unflattering opinion of the state of Argentinean society) where the bleak laughs choke in the throat and people only do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Fitting in theme, there is revenge creeping on the borders of "The Proposal," but Szifron, at his most cynical, suggests that for the right price, even karma can look the other way.

"Wild Tales" ends its comical drop into revenge-inspired insanity with "Until Death Do Us Part," where a wedding unravels after the bride discovers her new husband’s been sleeping with one of the guests. The event soon sucks everyone around into its destructive orbit – even the chef. Mirrors are shattered. Cake hits the floor. Blood and tears are shed, while emotions are battered into a fine powder. Much like last year’s "Force Majeure," you’re not sure if you should laugh at the nightmarish, borderline surreal festivities or give all these poor people a hug (I normally went with the former). The result is a marriage – and a collection of vignettes – hysterically and delightfully forged together by hellfire.

Considering all the stories share revenge as a key plot point, it’s not surprising "Wild Tales" occasionally feels a bit repetitive, each segment restarting the countdown to karma coming around.

It’s a tribute to Szifron’s screenplay that, even despite that, the stories remain entertainingly unpredictable. The barbed wire script quickly twists and coils in new ways each go around. Vengeance and violence may always be in the cards, but how it’ll turn up, how much it’ll turn up and where it’ll send the characters – all exceptionally well acted, playing the deadpan ridiculousness amusingly right – always feels left up in the air. Plus, his social commentary is sharply honed, featuring a Bunuel-esque sense of absurdity and how it discreetly picks away at so-called polite society. 

"Wild Tales" is certainly a mean, prickly little work (how it managed to sneak into the normally pretty stoic, drama-heavy Foreign Film category is a bit of a mystery). But swallowing a six-part dish of glass shards normally isn’t this much dark fun.