It takes prodigious comic gifts to make a loathsome, pathetic character so mesmerizing that you enjoy watching him dig himself into a hole for 90-plus minutes. Jim Cummings, the star, editor, co-writer, and co-director of “The Beta Test,” has those gifts. 

Cummings plays Jordan, a remorseless, manipulative Hollywood agent working for a CAA-like behemoth who gets ensnared in a conspiracy in the months leading up to his scheduled wedding to his fiancee Caroline (Virginia Newcomb). His troubles start when he accepts an engraved invitation to cheat. This is not a metaphor: the invitation is elegantly inscribed and printed on purple card stock and sealed in a purple envelope. Jordan is instructed to arrive in a certain hotel room on a certain day at a certain time if he wants to experience a no-strings-attached tryst with a woman. Both partners will stay masked and anonymous. 

Jordan goes. He has a great time. The masks are also purple, of course. Then Jordan’s euphoria fades and is replaced by paranoia. He was plenty paranoid even before he stepped out on Caroline, so this is bad. Very bad. Jordan is secretly a highly functioning alcoholic (though he wouldn’t describe himself that way). He takes a lot of personal and professional risks, most of them superficial, greedy, or nihilistic. He seems incapable of controlling his temper, blurting out insults whenever he’s dealing with anyone who has something he wants but isn’t obligated to give it up. 

As Jordan plunges deeper into the mystery of who sent the invitation and what they meant to gain by it—at various points impersonating a police officer and a private detective, and threatening to sue people he just met—”The Beta Test” starts to feel like the unholy love child of “Eyes Wide Shut”. I cannot tell you what this movie is narratively “about.” The ending, which is confusing and feels slapped-on, only intensifies the sense that the production is a vibe pretending to be a message. Maybe the filmmakers created a substantive, often hilarious main character and then built a project around him. Jordan incarnates the spirit of early 20th century “video or it didn’t happen” disasters. He’s a walking social media shame cycle, complete with insincere apology.

“The Beta Test” understands how to set up and pay off a joke by putting the camera in a particular spot and moving it to reveal or conceal a crucial detail. The movie is also adept at creating a cinematic version of the subjective voice in fiction, viewing Jordan in a detached, cool manner for long stretches, then shifting us inside his fevered brain long enough for him to misunderstand or mishear a statement by another character, which in turn triggers another panic attack, meltdown, or swan-dive into paranoia that is funny when we’re in Jordan’s head, and that becomes even funnier when we leave his consciousness and see him as others do.

Cummings has dark-and-slender, Billy Crudup-Jim Carrey leading man looks, and they intensify the self-lacerating nature of the character’s outbursts. That the joke is ultimately always on Jordan makes the character amusing rather than merely unpleasant. He verbally abuses subordinates, co-workers, lower-level functionaries at retail shops and in his own apartment building, his friends, and Caroline, often while pretending to have authority he doesn’t possess. Jordan’s disruptive snits are usually followed by (or interspersed with) half-assed apologies that sound as if Jordan is saying what he believes that society expects him to say, not what’s in his heart. 

Is there anything in Jordan’s heart? Maybe not. He’s a hollow, rotten person, faking his way through life and pinning his failures on others. At one point, Caroline accuses him of giving a performance as himself, a rare insult that penetrates Jordan’s thick skull. “The Beta Test” has a keen ear for the way that the phony-macho culture of deal-making and money-moving muddies language and reveals cravenness and duplicity. “Love the honesty … we love that,” Jordan says weakly after a client verbally eviscerates him, adding, “We’re gonna keep the conversation going!” Hassling apartment managers to force them to reveal the identity of a delivery person, Jordan warns them that he works for a major Hollywood agency identified by three letters: “I’ll give you a couple of guesses. You’re only gonna need one.”