Noomi Rapace in You Won’t Be Alone (Branko Starcevic/Focus Features)

You Won’t Be Alone can feel overbearing and overwrought, but this stark and pitiless film has something eternal about it. With its fairy-tale theme of shapeshifting imposed over both a bounteous and a harsh rural life, director Goran Stolevski’s folk/psychological/body/art-house horror may burrow under your skin and lodge itself there.

A truly scary monster creeps through the movie, an often nude creature with pitted, sore-looking red skin, and a more horrifying bald spot. We are used to male Freddy Kruegers and other grotesques, but this one gives us deeper shudders—the Wolf-Eateress, or Old Witch Maria, as she is called—is a woman. Is that why her air seems so malevolent, her spells so personal?

Defenseless before the witch’s claim on her newborn, a flinty-faced, distraught mother places her baby before the Wolf-Eateress, who condemns the child to a life of changing shape—and mutism, having cut out her tongue. Stolevski follows the young soul as she takes on different forms, from a feral teenager living in a rock cave, to a woman bullied by fellow peasants, to a mute young man, and finally to a girl who grows up into tragedy. No matter what shape the newborn assumes, though, it will be stalked and taunted by the witch throughout various lives.

The shift from body to body is not itself a smooth glide, accompanied as it is by woundings, disembowellings, and sometimes feverish sex. The movie writhes with gore, and its sound design bedevils with a rush of panting, gasping, slurping, and rustling. Snatches of poetry in voice-over complete the sense of disorientation with lines like, “Me the bees buzzing in my bowels” and “Are women wasps kisses chains?”

For all of the imaginative flourishes, You Won’t Be Alone is woven from the rough hemp of 19th-century peasant life. A mute woman (Noomi Rapace) silently takes beatings; animals circulate, some as enchanted agents of menace; a handsome peasant youth is scorned as though he’s touched in the head, although he takes part in tending the crops. And alongside roughness lies beauty. A filmic texture caresses the golden balm of woods and mountains and captures the dancelike movements of hauling in the harvest or presenting the bride at a village wedding.

While Stolevski styles his women with sores and broken teeth, it’s noteworthy that the young man he casts as the male bodily vessel for the restless soul is a juicy but conventional hunk (Carloto Coto) who could belong on a Fabio-style paperback cover. Other scenes glory in the golden limbs of nude men cavorting in a stream, adding a modern homoerotic thrill to the traditional folklore tableau.

In its reverence for rural life coupled with an edge of matter-of-fact brutality, You Won’t Be Alone harkens back to a past that inhabitants of modern life firmly reject. Luckily, the film’s obsessive, strange magic and its air of tragic destiny takes it to another place beyond mundane comparisons of yesterday and today. This harsh, mesmerizing movie reverberates with the faraway cry of a raven, the cold touch of a curse.