Genre-hopping in film can be challenging, but French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie pulls it off so smoothly it doesn’t even feel like hopping—more like a seamless, buttery glide. The writer-director of Stranger by the Lake, a dark, sensuous thriller, has now crafted a sinister, bizarre, funny, and sexually charged farce. Not only do the elements of Misericordia coalesce, but each intrigues equally in this unpredictable, original film.

Thirtyish Jérémie returns to his rural hometown after the death of a mentor and father figure. As Jérémie, blue-eyed actor Félix Kysyl resembles a slightly potato-faced Kyle MacLachlan—plain and trustworthy from a distance but smoldering and insinuating up close. At the core of Misericordia is this elusive, slightly creepy shape-shifter, and Kysyl’s performance holds our attention as we vainly try to pin him down.

The dead man’s faded widow (Catherine Frot) is pleased to see the visitor again and implores him to stay a while—an invitation that enrages her belligerent adult son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who suspects Jérémie has designs on maman. Scarily volatile, Vincent seems obsessed with Jérémie, angrily demanding to know how long he plans to stay and barging in on him while he sleeps in the guest room. Their animosity boils over into excruciating violence in the nearby woods, a site of many of the film’s mysteries and reveals. Once this conflict is resolved, Jérémie—the small-town Ripley—installs himself with the widow, flirts with a village troglodyte, and finds himself in an unusual debt to the pompous, beady-eyed local priest (Jacques Develay). Bumbling cops add a comic touch, and a crop of wild mushrooms thickens the plot almost too much.

But not quite. Though its pace appears unhurried, Misericordia is always shifting, its events and moods in constant motion. The people around Jérémie seem needy, readily accepting his outrageous lies—only to shrewdly demand a price for looking the other way. One minute, Jérémie is the desired; the next, the eager pursuer. Flashes of nudity provide humor and shock. Brutality and plain old weirdness lurk in the darkness beneath the placid, handsomely photographed village.

Misericordia binds eerie death vibes, kooky encounters, and a subversive queer sensibility into something both striking and puzzling. It also plays younger and older actors off each other in a way that is rare in today’s age-segregated cinema. Like its central character—tantalizingly out of reach—it may have something for everyone, something that shifts alarmingly the closer we get to it.