Rhayne Vermette’s Ste. Anne is a dark film, so dark that at times I thought my computer had gone to sleep, or at least that there had to be something deeply wrong with my brightness settings. During its most enigmatic moments, I would go mad trying to guess what I was seeing. A dark tower with a solitary window turns out to be a sliver of a woman’s green flannel shirt hemmed in by two columns of shadow. A fuzzed-out crucifix on a distant hill migrates across the screen, first towards us, and then away again. Are those people or coats? Later, two demonic orange eyes glide across the screen and although at first I think that they have to belong to a jack-o’-lantern, it turns out they are part of something much bigger, a shape that dwarves the woman who comes to confront it, perhaps even a bona fide unholy presence.

This would make sense. Ste. Anne is dark in many ways. Shadow predominates, but so too does a kind of foreboding or sadness. The story, or situation, is related by dark bodies posed against anxious, aggressive landscapes. A doomy, relentless soundtrack of static and drones makes even the most mundane of actions seem as if it belongs to a secretive and mournful choreography. Old photographs are erased by light. Landscapes are obliterated by it. As the characters rifle through family albums, a translucent ghost peers over their shoulders. In a place like this even the boundaries between mediums feel permeable. Colours seep from frame to frame and the surface of the 16mm film is scratched and pitted, its movement flickering and erratic. Sometimes it feels as if a shot lasts only as long as the camera can bear it. Buried within the home-video quality of these sequences are some magisterial images, the kind that leave a real impression on you, and which make the small town in Manitoba, Canada, where Ste. Anne is set, seem like something that emerges out of mythic time, ancient and abstract. At other times watching the film feels like remembering somebody else’s childhood.

Along with this kind of formal reticence, Vermette’s refusal to state anything openly exacerbates the film’s mystery. Renee has returned home to her family and indigenous Métis community four years after leaving them with no explanation. In the interim, her young daughter Athene has been raised by Renee’s brother Modeste and his wife Elenore. Nobody knows what to think of her sudden return and nobody asks any questions. It is only after Elenore finally expresses her fear that Renee will leave again and take Athene with her that Modeste asks his sister where she has been and what her plans for her daughter are, though he receives no answers. Throughout the film the burden of speaking invariably falls to image and soundscape. Everything we see on the screen is not merely filtered through somebody else’s subjectivity but dominated by it, though whose is never made clear. Right before the news of Renee’s homecoming sends shockwaves across their close-knit community, the opening sounds of birdsong give way to a roar that rises and rises until it cuts away all at once, just as inexplicably as it began. Whose anxiety is this? The community’s or the family’s or Elenore’s or Modeste’s or Renee’s? Or is it something that belongs to their world more generally? It is impossible to tell. Ste. Anne is full of proxies and doubles. In one scene Renee crosses a bridge over railway tracks and encounters a well-dressed mad woman shouting at the sky. She places a hand on her back before walking on again.

In its preoccupation with texture and memory and vague commitment to narrative, Ste. Anne reminds me more than anything of the short films of Shuji Terayama, especially The Eraser (1977). There are the same blazes of colour, the same sense of something fleeting, half-glimpsed and half-grasped. In both cases distance is willful, ambiguity imposed. The subservience of matter to our idea of it is celebrated. We can see this by returning to the relentless presence of darkness. Near the end of Ste. Anne, the family sit in the dim living room before bed and Elenore reads from the book in her hand. The page is a square of shadow. There is physically no way she can be reading from it. What we are seeing belongs to a memory or a dream; it is a scene absolutely transformed by feeling, an image overwhelmed by subjectivity.