Hungarian auteur Bence Fliegauf is about as far from the mainstream as you can get, although he has tried his hand at various Hollywood genres — including the 2010 English-language sci-fi flick Womb, which starred Eva Green and Lesley Manville. But his eclectic range of movies are often dark and difficult to classify, which may explain why he’s been a regular on the festival circuit for nearly two decades without ever getting much play in theaters.

The director’s latest feature, Jimmy Jaguar, is another brooding head-scratcher, one that’s equal parts fascinating and frustrating. On paper, it could be pitched as a Hungarian Blair Witch Project meets Insidious, using a faux-documentary device to explore a case of demonic possession among a group of outsiders living in the countryside. But it doesn’t include a single jump scare, killing scene or drop of blood, and never manages to frighten the viewer. It plays more like a meditation on horror itself — how it seeps into the real world, which is filled with plenty of horrors of its own.

Both provocative and contemplative, the film caused a steady stream of walkouts during its premiere in competition at Karlovy Vary. And yet Fliegauf is a gifted auteur who knows what he wants and also how to get it, filling his movie with chilling everyday images — darkened roads, abandoned pets, isolated farmhouses — that work their way under our skin. Jimmy Jaguar may not be outright scary, but it leaves viewers (at least those stick around till the end) with a haunted feeling, as if the world had somehow gone wrong.

The storyline sounds like perfect fodder for Jason Blum, who could probably up the adrenaline factor by several notches and turn this premise into a box-office hit. Somewhere in rural Hungary, two extremely strange men — Seed (Erik Major) and Marci Balfi (Krisztian Peer) — have been arrested for kidnapping and sequestering an old hermit living alone in the woods. They claim that a demon named Jimmy Jaguar, or Jagu, possessed their souls and told them to do it.

But there’s a catch: The man they attacked happens to be a Serbian war criminal who was hiding out for years in Hungary, escaping arrest by the Hague and living in relative freedom. The kidnappers claim they had no idea who he was, but the unseen documentarian telling their story suggests they committed a crime of pure vengeance.

Does Jimmy Jaguar exist, or is he simply a crazy alibi for the culprits? Fliegauf spends the rest of the movie asking that question, which he complicates by adding several other characters said to be possessed by Jagu. They include a pregnant girl (Juli Jakab), who believes she was inseminated by the demon à la Rosemary’s Baby; a woman (Nora Jakab) who runs a creepy commune where one of the kidnappers takes a vow of silence; and two Jagu-loving 20-somethings (Aliz Solyom, Lilla Kizlinger), who work at an outdoor kennel filled with cats and dogs who all seem to be possessed as well.

Fliegauf constantly toys with horror film elements, whether in the use of found footage, the droning music hinting at something awful that’s about to happen, or locations that look like perfect staging grounds for murder. (The director is also credited as composer and production designer.) And yet there’s hardly an ounce of violence on screen, which feels like both a cop-out and, in some ways, an accomplishment. Jimmy Jaguar is a horror movie without explicit horror. It’s as if censors came in to cut out anything that could result in an R rating, leaving us the eerie remnants of what may have happened.

Still, the director indulges in a few twists that are obvious and a bit corny, especially in the closing act. By that point, we’re still wondering if Jimmy Jaguar — who first appeared as a character in a spooky Hungarian children’s song from the 1970s — is the real thing or not. Fliegauf enlists a group of experts — including a psychiatrist (Gyorgy Banko), an anthropologist (Vilma Fozy) and the detective (Eszter Balla) who interrogated the kidnappers at the start of the movie — to debate the issue, filming their discussion like a real talk show panel.

It’s yet another way to distance the viewer from anything remotely scary, doubling down on the notion that horror is not only about killers leaping out of closets or from behind trees, but about the evil that exists all around us — as well as the fears that such evils evoke. This may not convince viewers walking into Jimmy Jaguar hoping to get a good fright, but, for better or worse, Fliegauf has never really been interested in convincing anyone except himself.

Full credits

Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Competition)
Production company: Fraktal Film
Cast: Katerina Falbrova, Juraj Loj, Maya Kintera, Zuzana Sulajova, Mare, Cisovsky
Director, screenwriter: Bence Fliegauf
Producers: Bence Fliegauf, Monika Mecs, Erno Mesterhazy, Gabor Ferenczy
Executive producer: Barbara Bernath
Cinematographer: Matyas Gyuricza
Production designer: Bence Fliegauf
Editor: Andra Zimay
Composer: Bence Fliegauf
Sales: Fraktal Film
In Hungarian

1 hour 52 minutes