You don’t have to have ever been in a Home Owner’s Association (HOA) to be triggered by Jirí Havelka’s “The Owners, (Vlastníci),” a cynical and dark Czech comedy about “democracy” in action.

Basically a real-time nightmare of an HOA meeting about residents/owners of an old apartment building who can’t seem to decide on anything, or decide on deciding to decide, it gave me chest pains.

The characters are “types,” the laughs are scattered and cutting and the parable intended is pretty obvious.

Democracy is difficult to attain, more difficult to maintain and easy to disrupt. All it takes is one obstructionist, dimwit or cunning saboteur and nothing will ever get done.

The “owners” in this one vote per apartment HOA, with one cantankerous old coot owning three and having three votes, meet off property to talk about structural problems, financial limitations and possible improvements to their “pre-revolution” multi-storey mid-city building.

A go-getter on maternity leave (Tereza Ramba) and her placating husband (Vojtech Kotek) are the chairwoman and minutes-taker, respectively, ready to run through their 90 minute gathering, but braced for the fact that there’s no “running” in this building, or anything to do with it.

A pedantic martinet (Klára Melísková) is Ms. Roberts Rules of Order, barking “We have to VOTE on that”(in Czech with English subtitles) about literally every wrinkle in the way the meeting is conducted.

The cranky old man Milos (Jirí Lábus) mutters about “When I ran this” and other reminiscences of Life Under Socialism, repeatedly.

A dolt (David Novotný) sitting in for his dying mother can’t be persuaded not to vote for both sides on every issue.

A dim, reading-and-or-sight-impaired old gossip (Dagmar Havlová) interrupts every train of thought with random complaints, blurting out bits of gossip the way Milos drops casual racial, sexual and gender insults.

“What did you MEAN by that?” she fumes at every comeback and clapback her obnoxious busybudy asides earn her.

As she is prone to malapropisms — “Embola Virus,” “Conflict of Pinterest” — there’s a lot of “explaining” to do.

The gay guy (Andrej Polák) is quicker to exasperate over the state of the meeting than the couple running the show.

There’s a woman subletting her flat out to “six students from Ghana,” her sketchy “business advisor” who hands out a card for a different business every time something needs to be inspected, fixed, replaced or built, a pair of twins who’ve just inherited their late father’s flat and pregnant newlywed newcomers easily bullied into voting this way or that.

It’s a home or condo-owner’s nightmare of sincere, smart and reasonable people outnumbered by obstinate skinflints, greedheads, obstructionists and shortsighted idiots.

Sound like any voting/elected bodies you know?

Actor-turned writer-director Havelka — “Emergency Situation” was his — treats this like a play filmed in real time, with steadily rising frustrations and a few third act fireworks.

The laughs are mostly winces of recognition as we hear unfiltered fools let their inner prejudices out, others respond to those insults and a few HOA members struggle mightily to keep the meeting going so that they can actually get something done.

Ramba, Havlová, Melísková and Lábus are standouts in the cast, displaying varying degrees ot exasperation, stubbornness, concern and blithe dismissals of concern without a whit of expertise.

Havelka’s not-quite-farce reminds us of how important “rules” are,” and how bad actors can bend them into obstruction, how important civility is and how pointless it is for a gay man or anybody else to try and explain “solidarity” and group action to the dogmatic, the dim and the determined-to-do-nothing.

No, it doesn’t make legislative “gridlock” any more appetizing or understandable. But “The Owners” does a good job of reminding us that the alternative to this messy, exhausting, time-consuming business of “every voice” must be heard and every vote should be equal (giving Milos three votes because he has three flats is America’s broken “system” in a nutshell) is almost unthinkable.

Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Tereza Ramba, Vojtech Kotek, Dagmar Havlová, Klára Melísková, Andrej Polák and Jirí Lábus

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jirí Havelka. A Big World Pictures release.

Running time: 1:37