The French filmmaker Robert Bresson once said: “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.” In “I Was at Home, but…,” the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world. (It won her the best director award at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival.)

“I Was at Home, but …” begins with a hare being chased by a dog across a rugged, bleached-out rural landscape. It’s a tense race for life — the hare is fast, the dog too — and invokes countless scenes of endangered bunnies, including in Renoir’s “Rules of the Game.” (Schanelec’s title, in turn, seems to nod at Ozu’s “I Was Born, but…”) The chase appears to end with the hare resting among an outcropping of rocks. This is followed by a brief, enigmatic interlude of a charming donkey wandering in a derelict house where the dog tears at a small, dead animal, presumably our hapless hare.

After this mysterious opener, we cut to a girl in a red coat sitting alone on a curb in deep twilight, framed by a stand of trees in the background, a backpack next to her. The combination of the color of the coat, the isolation of the girl and the crepuscular woods brings to mind Little Red Riding Hood, an association that settles in your mind like an unformed thought. A boy — later revealed to be the son of the protagonist — walks by wordlessly. A few beats later there’s a shot of him in front of a brick building, where the buzzing of exterior lights mixes with bird calls and insects whirs.

Not long after, the movie shifts to a classroom where a girl recites a line from “Hamlet”: “Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light!” In the original, these words are spoken by the Player Queen in the play within the play, when she insists she would never remarry, an allusion that — like the Red Riding Hood imagery — settles in your head as a possible clue. As you cast about for meaning, you may remember Hamlet’s mother, the real queen, who in this same section says, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” This isn’t something one could say of Schanelec, whose narrative approach is austere and elliptical, and whose intentions can be so inscrutable that “I Was at Home, but …” can feel like a private reverie rather than one meant for sharing.