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Cassie Workman has spent the past two years living and working in the US. She has returned home to Australia with tales to tell – but perhaps not the ones you were expecting.

At the centre of her new show, You Are Here, is an extended metaphor about modern capitalism told through a young Hispanic boy’s battle with a sentient shopping mall. If that sounds weird, that’s because it is. This is a Cassie Workman show, she tells us as she grills a plastic lobster over a cellophane fire, anything could happen.

The fictional West Valley Mall in Newark, New Jersey, has been abandoned. Since its heyday in the early 80s, this monolith to American consumerism has fallen into disrepair and been entirely forgotten – until a nine-year-old boy breaks in and finds himself at the mercy of the shopping mall’s twisting halls and forgotten alcoves. The mall claims to offer everything a person could ever want but the boy only wants one thing – to return home.

This is a different kind of storytelling from what you will see at other shows across the Melbourne international comedy festival. The story at the show’s centre is more fable than anything. It is important, Workman tells the audience, that we get on board with the magical realism early on. She needn’t worry though, because the audience is enraptured. As the tale unravels, the people around me react audibly to its twists and turns, gasping in worry and awe. We are willing to follow her blindly into the darkness at the show’s heart. The mall feeds on fear and confusion, after all, so we need to stick together.

Workman’s style is as much poetry as it is comedy. Her word choice and carefully constructed similes are dazzlingly clever. But for a show so rooted in surrealism, You Are Here is never inaccessible or needlessly intellectual. At one point, a particularly niche joke is explained with a Wikipedia screenshot, so no one is out of the loop. The jokes come thick and fast, quickly breaking any tension. Workman shepherds us cheerfully through the elaborate world she’s created.

The show slides between standup, storytelling, graphics and songs. All the artwork in the show was created by Workman herself, from the lush backdrop featuring escalators in a forest to the handmade vintage TV which shows a series of hand-drawn illustrations. The show is also punctuated with original songs, from catchy vintage jingles to a haunting ballad sung in duet with fellow comedian Reuben Kaye. In between all this, Workman delivers bitingly funny observations about modern consumerism into a microphone housed in a handmade cereal box of “Coco Props”. The transitions between all these elements are sometimes jarring, but they are done with a deftness that never leaves the audience behind.

You Are Here elegantly captures the feeling of living in a world that often feels like it is crumbling. While many comedians are tackling similar topics this year, Workman’s show is unlike anything else I’ve seen at this year’s MICF. It is extremely difficult to create something that is both so dark and so funny, blending absurdity and existentialism, but Workman has done so masterfully.

It is obvious why You Are Here has been nominated for best show this year: it is a remarkable piece of comedy – quiet, thoughtful, but also wickedly funny. I know it will stay with me for a long time.