From the first frame of Eli Powers’ (Holy Moses) pastoral nightmare, Skin & Bone, you know something is awry. A horse whinnies in distress and his keeper, the mysterious Serene in an exciting genre turn from Amanda Seyfried, can’t calm the beast down. It is a fleeting prelude only fully appreciated after a second watch: Serene, it seems, is at odds with the world’s natural order. This order will soon be thrown further into flux when Christian, an unwitting drifter in an equally exciting turn from Thomas Sadoski, arrives at her farm looking for work.

Skin & Bone unfolds like a bad dream. An eerie invocation from Serene’s banjo is a harbinger for all the ill that is to come. This ill is threaded finely from Powers as he sews a sense of dread that permeates the entire film. It will only escalate as Christian finds moldering grave stones in the woods and hears phantom whispers in his ears. By the second night on the farmstead, he has learned what we intuited from the beginning: best sleep with a knife. Doom hangs over Christian’s head like Damocles’ sword. The power of Skin & Bone is knowing at any moment it can — and will — fall.

Grounded as it is, there is a delightfully mythic quality to Skin & Bone. Christian ventures into peril like a desperate sailor passing through Scylla’s straits. He is lured further into the treacherous waters by Serene’s siren singsong. Ultimately, he will be turned into livestock in a twist echoing Circe’s fabled swine. All of these monsters are women and Serene is no exception. Within her character, we find man’s latent anxiety of a woman empowered realized. Unbeknownst to Christian, he has been catapulted into heroic archetype. His destiny is to slay her. What he does not know is it will take much more than a pocket-knife.

The film is characterized by a series of elements eroded from days, years, even decades, of Serene’s generational powers. The bucolic farmstead with its broken fences and ramshackle barn never quite feels idyllic. The cool palette appropriately drab even as the sun shines. In lieu of a traditional score, the diegetic soundscape from Jack Goodman (The Windshield Wiper) sometimes lulls and often thrusts us from scene to scene, lending itself perfectly to Powers’ quietly unnerving aesthetic. As we near the film’s final moments, the clicking sounds of crickets and cicadas have become grating. The heat of cinematographer Aidan Sheldon’s nighttime photography, wayward and stifling. Christian has woken up but his nightmare remains: his story will be another footnote in Serene’s myth.