Putting the queer back into queer cinema and the art in auteur, Alain Guiraudie creates strikingly unusual emotional textures with his latest offering which revisits the themes of his 2013 gay-cruising thriller Stranger By the Lake. Here, he replaces a killer on the loose in the background with wolves circling a sheep farm as various sexual adventures take place. Wandering across a field, itinerant screenwriter Léo meets single mother and shepherdess Marie, who he become involved with and soon becomes the father of a newborn. But when it becomes apparent that the possibly bisexual Léo isn’t in love with her, she abandons Léo with the baby. Léo goes on a convoluted chase, first after her, then after the baby, while also pursuing a sullen young man named Yoan for a film audition (or something more?). Léo develops an unexpected camaraderie with a Pink Floyd–loving cranky elderly man whom Yoan takes care of. Meanwhile, Marie’s father pressures Léo into reuniting with Marie, and then pressures him for something else. Guiraudie’s often expressionless actors are frequently psychologically opaque, giving away little of their inner lives except through what they don’t say or how they fail to react. While Guiraudie mines ambiguity in the first half of the movie, as the characters’ behaviour patterns sharpen into focus in the second half, the situations become increasingly surreal (with shades of David Lynch) and teeter precariously on the edge of credulity. This stylized, offbeat neo–folk tale sustains interest with its highwire balancing act between the banal and the absurd as it progresses into daring new territory.