Agnieszka Holland, renowned Polish director of works including Europa, Europa, is back with a new film taking us on an eco-fabulist murder mystery tour deep into the central European forest, starring a beautiful ageing woman with a long grey hair and a passing resemblance to Angela Carter.

She is the eccentric Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka) a part-time teacher and full-time mystic living alone in a village on the Polish-Czech border, loved by her young pupils but hated by the boorish menfolk thereabouts for her passionate hatred of their hunting and animal slaughter; she will disrupt shooting parties, screaming and crying, and often makes angry complaints to the lazy uncaring police when animals are killed out of season.

The police are always wearily impolite to her – although I sort of sympathised with them when Duszejko reveals herself to be an astrologer and says that belief in astrology is equivalent to belief in evolution. Worryingly, there is every sign that we are supposed to nod understandingly at that.

When Duszejko’s two beloved dogs vanish, she understandably suspects some kind of foul play, and that the smug hunting enthusiasts have taken a spiteful revenge on her. But then these men’s bodies start turning up all over the place, including that great trackless forest, horribly murdered in various occult ways. Duszejko gets on the killer’s trail (or spoor), and as far as she is concerned, the culprit may not be human. Should the police really be looking for an ... animal?

Pokot is based on the 2009 novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. It is partly a conventional detective story or forensic thriller with Duszejko in the Miss Marple role, and partly a magical fairy tale, a dramatisation of dark Freudian beasts hiding deep in our psychological thicket, with many amusingly surreal touches. It’s a mashup which makes my heart sink a bit: the academic fantasy stuff could undermine the reality on which a thriller depends – and actually the plot does lean heavily on Duszejko befriending a police IT expert and systems whiz who can magically gain access to surveillance camera feeds and make all the lights go out.

Duszejko winds up falling in love with a visiting entomologist and beetle lover of Polish origin who tells her, deadpan, that “mushroom picking in the forest is the only thing that brings Poles together”. His priestly seriousness in saying that is something that Aki Kaurismaki could admire. The film is watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – though shallower than it thinks.