Starring Paul Hamy. In English and Portuguese, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

St. Anthony of Padua was a 13th-century Portuguese friar and disciple of St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order. Born Fernando Martins, the future saint was known for his charismatic speeches, commitment to extreme poverty, and fatally sickly nature. In fact, some doctors still refer to a rare, delirium-inducing intestinal infection as St. Anthony’s Fire. He’s also the patron saint of lost things, and people certainly lose their shit here.

A fifth feature for Portugal’s João Pedro Rodrigues, The Ornithologist is one weird-ass fever dream of a movie—two hours of unpredictable mayhem, grotesque humour, and almost sublime contemplation, some of it zoological. But the less you know in advance the better, once you have decided to surrender to this Franciscan’s oddly spiritual journey.

The tale starts slowly, with another Fernando (French actor Paul Hamy), a bird-obsessed specialist who has travelled to remote northeastern Portugal to capture details about a rare black heron. He finds what he’s looking for; we also see him from the heron’s point of view. But while kayaking through a steep, colour-saturated ravine, Fernando fails to notice approaching rapids that will dash his reverie, and his boat.

He washes up somewhere on the Portuguese end of St. James’s Way, known in Spain as El Camino de Santiago. In short order, the ornithologist is found by a pair of female pilgrims from China who take their Christian conversion far too seriously, atavistic night spirits who rob and piss on him, a mute shepherd who catches his ire, some bare-breasted, equestrian Amazons who mistake him for a deer, and—well, I’ve already said too much.

There are many memento mori, including skulls and saintly relics, images of bondage and other semibiblical cruelty, full male nudity, and the speaking of rarely heard languages, including the regional Mirandese and ancient Latin. People drink blood from wounds and milk from animal teats. The director, who already dubs the lead actor’s Portuguese, later begins intermittently subbing himself for Hamy. Threading through this sometimes baffling widescreen barrage is a seemingly sincere search for deeper meaning that is also being threatened as the natural world disappears. Oh, and there’s also some ’80s pop music to further enliven this medieval theme-park ride.