Very, very nouveau Francais stuff. As in, full of nudity, fairly sexual in nature and pretty nonsensical from a narrative standpoint. The one standout is star Agathe Rouselle as Alexia, who's up for absolutely everything writer/director Julia Ducournau (Raw) asks of her.

There's a brief opening coda showing the young Alexia driving with her father, irritating him so much she causes him to crash, her coming out of the treatment later with a titanium plate in her head and an impressive cranial scar over her ear.

As a young woman years later, she's an incredibly sexualised figure who apparently works as a stripper at the kind of car racing meets you'd see in a Fast and the Furious movie, dressed very skimpily, dancing and draping herself across bonnets to tease the attendees.

But things turn ugly later when an adoring fan tries to force himself on her in her car as she's preparing to leave for the night and she brutally murders him with the metal stick she holds her hair in place with.

After going back inside to wash the blood and viscera off herself (completely naked all this time, mind you), she comes across the muscle car we saw her modelling with earlier in the evening, which has apparently come to life. She climbs inside it, fucks it – which you can't describe but have to merely see – and goes on with her life.

In short order we find out that the creep she offed at the car meet wasn't a random act of self defence, but that Alexia is seriously unhinged and has murdered several people. At a house party that turns into an orgy she kills everyone except one terrified and lucky woman, realising the jig might be up.

Now pregnant with the car's baby (yeah, it's that movie – we've already seen her bleed motor oil from her vagina), Alexia kills her parents by locking them inside after setting the house on fire, tapes down her breasts and rapidly expanding pregnant belly, shaves her head, adopts a severe scowl, breaks her own nose by slamming her face down on a dingy petrol station bathroom sink and tries to pass herself off as a young man who went missing as a boy years before to evade capture.

The problem is that the missing boy's father, a macho fireman named Vincent, finds out and accepts Alexia as his son, who's now calling herself by the missing boy's name.

Everyone from his colleagues at the fire station to his estranged ex wife wonder what's wrong with Vincent, whether he's lost his mind and truly believes this mute androgynous young woman is really his lost boy, or whether he's just too grief-stricken and wants to live in the comforting fantasy of it.

And as Alexia starts to understand what it means to have a protective figure love her, she starts to inhabit the role more fully, despite the fact that she's growing bigger, pregnant with the baby of a car.

I don't know if Ducournau means for you to take it literally. Her back catalogue has always been pretty Cronenbergian and this movie's no different, with lots of motifs about the horrific fusion of human flesh and metal, especially in the climactic birth scene. It's more a twisted fairy tale than anything.

Deeper themes seem to be how grief makes us crazy and how any human connection, even based on complete falsehood, is enough. Narratively however, it goes in too many weird directions for the sum of the parts to hang together in a satisfying story.