In Wild Bones, Roxy Bugler plays Fay, a woman likely to have room reservations in The House of Psychotic Women, Kier-La Janisse’s survey of women’s neuroses in film. That Fay is disturbed is one of the few concrete aspects of the film. She has been traumatized, but how? Did her dad abuse her? Did he cut and run from the family? Or is he dead? Or did her mother abuse her? Or was it both parents? How true is her sister Alice’s love? Is the family gaslighting Fay for some strange reason or cruel kink? Wild Bones doesn’t worry about answering these questions, but rather submerges the audience in the experience of Fay’s paranoia and alienation. Some may say it drowns us in her destructive obsessiveness.

Wild Bones is not for those wanting a traditional story arc that offers obstacles and tidy resolutions. The film explores neuroticism and breakdown without much relief. One can also read it as a neo-Gothic tale of haunting, with a mood and tempo that falls somewhere between Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002) and Oz Perkins’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016). The slow, sometimes hazy surface, reminiscent of Ramsay’s film but with a brighter color scheme overall is punctuated by moments of surreal Lynchian imagery. One character even resembles the pitch-black woodsmen of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). If the viewer allows it, the images, along with impressive sound design, create a subversive and disturbing subjective viewpoint through Fay. We can’t tell what parts are reality, memory, or hauntings, just as Fay inhabits a liminal space where all three overlap.

The small cast is exceptional, though most have limited screen time. This provides enough space for Liz Farahadi’s remarkable performance as Candace. Her menace is multiplied by the brevity of screen time. Bugler’s performance as Fay is just as striking and unsettling but controlled, as she is the centerpiece of the movie. Besides emoting through a kind of modern dance, I couldn’t figure out why Fay was so unnerving until I realized her eyes are widely dilated for most of the film. I’m not sure how it was done, but it adds to the idea that we are living in her subjectivity, that her eyes are sensitive. Maybe they are the source of her visions, or at least enhance them. Are her eyes dilated from medications? Is she taking recreational drugs? Our vision gets blurred by her own problematic sight.

I felt so buried in Fay’s subjectivity that I also didn’t have a lot of traditional emotional attachments one usually has to characters. I felt a kind of empathy. The protagonists of Ottessa Moshfegh’s fiction create similar bonds with an audience. Some might experience this as flawed, but I don’t. Ultimately, the film is a dark tragic story and contains none of the pressure valves of comedic relief or retro-novelty similar movies have. It’s a compressed ambience of disquietude, but somehow still an enjoyable cinematic experience.