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When it comes to creating a feature with the intention of scaring your audience, sometimes the best choice is to go with the classics, plucking creatures from yesteryear. Of course, modern viewers are going to need more than the black and white Universal Classic Monsters that dominated the screen from the 1930s to the 1950s. Those same iconic names are still welcome, of course, like mummies and vampires, but new twists must be put on their usual plots in order to garner renewed attention.

Just recently, an ambitious movie made by European director and filmmaker Jacques Molitor (Mammejong) looked to wield this plot-making recipe when he evolved the concept of werewolves through Wolfkin (also known as Kommunioun). This fantasy and horror hybrid begins with an intimate cold open where Elaine, the main female lead, and a man named Patrick are making love in a small clearing within a green-filled forest.

When a German drifter walks into the quaint Luxembourg village of Schandelsmillen with a scruffy beard, bag full of money, and stoically gruff attitude, we wonder what secrets his past holds. Jens Fauser (Frederick Lau) arrives with a single question: “Do you need help with the harvest?” That specific query unfortunately can’t help but make him stick out like a sore thumb further than he already does considering the harvest is half over. The townspeople therefore prove cold and cryptic, forcing him to accept work would be better found elsewhere. But as soon as that realization to move on arrives, the atmosphere abruptly shifts. Young Lucy (Vicky Krieps) invites him to her bed and old man Jos Gierens (Marco Lorenzini) takes him under wing. Suddenly he’s found home.

Writer/director Govinda Van Maele’s debut narrative feature Gutland shows this in rapid fashion so we never quite acknowledge everything’s inherent strangeness.