In their secluded farmhouse, a mother, formerly a surgeon in Portugal, teaches her daughter, Francisca, to understand anatomy and be unfazed by death. One afternoon, a visitor horrifyingly shatters the idyll of Francisca’s life, deeply traumatizing her, but also awakening some unique curiosities.

Serial-killer movies are a dime a dozen, but it’s a rare entry in the genre which makes a woman the perpetrator of its horrors. A striking, elegiac debut from American filmmaker Nicolas Pesce, this monochrome nightmare cloaks the evolution of a murderess in a wistful air of bruising melancholia.