When it comes to immersive cinema, few film-makers can hold a candle to British maverick Andrew Kötting. From the acclaimed coastal journey of Gallivant to the discursive odysseys of By Our Selves and Edith Walks, Kötting’s films place us within the landscape of their narratives – physical, historical and literary. Dividing his energies between installations, performances, books and films, his interdisciplinary works blur the lines between documentary and drama, invention and investigation. While his concerns may at times seem alienatingly esoteric (philosophical abstractions are a recurrent feature), his films are tactile, earthy works that provoke pleasingly gut-level responses. Watching an Andrew Kötting movie is like digging your hands deep into a steamy midden of ideas, leaving you to pick the conceptual dirt from under your fingernails for days.

Kötting’s latest (distributed by Manchester’s adventurous Home Artist Film) is a typically polymorphous affair, the concluding chapter of his Earthworks trilogy that arrives alongside an imposingly hefty book. Blending elements of dystopian sci-fi fantasy, recent-history social realism and timeless metaphysical allegory, Lek and the Dogs takes inspiration from a 2010 Hattie Naylor play that itself draws upon the real-life 90s story of Ivan Mishukov. Having either fled or been thrown out of his home at the age of four, the young Mishukov spent two years living on the streets of Moscow, befriending a pack of wild dogs that became his companions and guardians. In Kötting’s film, the adult Lek (Xavier Tchili) looks back upon his feral life, armed with a cassette recorder on which his younger self (voiced by Clay Barnard) recorded his formative experiences.

French actor and performance artist Tchili played incidental characters named Lek in previous Earthworks instalments This Filthy Earth and Ivul, which respectively played out upon and above the ground. Completing the cycle, Lek and the Dogs ventures beneath the apocalyptic surface of the world, into the pipes and caves where Lek seeks refuge. “We are under the ground,” he says, “in our secret den”, a canine sanctuary from the cruel and depleted human world. “I called for my dogs” becomes a repeated refrain as Lek recounts his return to human society and his inability to shed his pack past. “You are so full of dog,” says Mina, the partner whom he will abandon as he retreats once more from the upright world.

While Tarkovsky and Beckett are obvious points of reference, some altogether more random (and quite possibly spurious) connections seem to emerge from the alluring montage of drama, home movies, and archive footage. Alongside familiar stylistic similarities to the works of Guy Maddin and Derek Jarman, the shadowy spectre of the bald Lek appears to recall Brando’s Colonel Kurtz confronting “the horror, the horror” in Apocalypse Now. Visions of the “valley of ashes” from The Great Gatsby are brought to mind by depictions of a smog-ridden world, while images of groaning industry have something of the nightmarish quality of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Meanwhile, haunting sequences shot in the Atacama desert, Chile, reminded me of both the otherworldy weirdness of Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and of the soul-searching investigations of Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light.

Just as Guzmán’s documentary meditated upon the cosmic coexistence of past and present, so Kötting pointedly quotes Eugene O’Neill’s dictum that “there is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now”. While film footage is flipped and reversed, friendly “wizard” Alan Moore muses upon concepts of “personal apocalypse” and “solid time” in which “we are all composing our worlds individually from our moment-by-moment perceptions”, a core theme of this strange and alarming film.

Moore’s voice is just one of many that litter the rich soundscape of Kötting’s movie. Along with Lek’s own ramblings (delivered in an imagined eastern European “grammelot” with English subtitles), we hear from a “body psychotherapist” and a “child psychologist”, interspersed with fragments of distorted transmissions that seem somehow linked to images of cratered moonscapes and outer space.

Ultimately, whatever one takes from this overwhelming collage of sound and vision will be wholly personal. Enigmatic chapter titles (“The Ancient Customs”, “A Natural History of Destruction”) do little to establish definitive readings, and I suspect that Kötting, whose playful sense of humour should not be underestimated, would shy away from restrictive interpretations. Yet a final note of hope seems incontrovertible, bringing matters to a close on a positive note that reduced me to wholly unexpected tears.