The Spanish title of Amat Escalante’s film, La región salvaje, translates as “the Wild Region”, which may refer to somewhere in space, or the riskier shores of human desire, or this Mexican writer-director’s lawless imagination. His last film, 2013’s Heli, about innocents caught up in the drug war, was at once coolly lucid in tone and horrific in content.

The Untamed features a similar combination of rigorous directing style and confrontational imagery, but ventures into far stranger territory. It’s about three working-class people – a young mother, her macho husband and her gay brother – whose lives are transformed when a mysterious woman (Simone Bucio) gets them entangled, and I mean entangled, with her ardent paramour who is, let’s say, not from around these parts. Escalante takes a hothouse hybrid of science-fiction horror and implants it into the realm of the everyday; this is where kitchen-sink realism meets the tentacular macabre of HP Lovecraft.

This audacious film miraculously holds the balance between two seemingly incompatible registers, in a way not dissimilar to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. That’s partly thanks to naturalistic acting by a strong cast including the disarming Bucio, whose face, otherworldly and remarkably sad, is one of the film’s eeriest effects. Another is the squirming apparition seen in a barn, one of the most horribly tactile visions that CGI has yet given us.

Escalante has much to say about libido and violence, and about the benefits and pitfalls of transgression, but he says it indirectly, in an unpredictable, often teasingly elusive way. Despite the avowed debt to Andrzej Żuławski’s famously disturbing 1981 film Possession, this is bracingly individual stuff. Just don’t expect to touch calamari again in a hurry.