Interpreting a Dane Komljen film is a fool's errand. If you go by any conventional logic and grasp at its fleetingly specific elements, you soon find yourself at a dead end. Having said that, his latest outing, Desire Lines, which has just world-premiered in Locarno's main competition, might be his most accessible and accomplished to date, purely based on the strength of the imagery, the universality of its themes and the associative connections between its disparate, but oddly homogenous, parts.

The feature does have a three-act structure, but this is more reflected in the shifting atmosphere than in a storytelling arc. We find the sleep-deprived Branko (Ivan Čuić), in his thirties, following his brother, whose face we never see and whom he lives with but never talks to, through Belgrade – an underground train station, a shopping mall, a cruising spot in a park. He repeatedly calls their other brother, whom we gather is a war veteran, on a landline, never reaching him and leaving troubled messages.

Like in Komljen's other films, the characters speak in long, poetic, literary-like sentences, not necessarily addressing the person they are talking to. Branko himself gets a call from an old schoolmate, who sounds desperate and says she is in another city, but as per the sequence of events as conveyed by Marko Ferković's editing, she is standing under his balcony with a mobile phone.

This first act ends when, after a lot of walking through the city and a forest, Branko ends up in a military barracks and disappears through a wall. There are strong indications that he doesn't really exist, or at least that other people don't see him. Once he passes through the wall, he keeps walking and falls face down in the woods, and is found by a group of three people that we might initially take for a family. Among them is a rare recognisable face: Serbian star Branka Katić.

There is no traditional music score; instead, the film is blanketed by Jakov Munižaba's sound design, which mixes the diegetic and the non-diegetic, often indistinguishably. The atmosphere in the first part is that of surreal dread, owing to both the sound and the violent images. The violence, often of a sexual nature or self-inflicted, is itself mostly off-screen, but its consequences are painfully visible.

The second part is completely set in the forest, where there seems to be a commune of people living in close accordance with nature, next to a large, socialist-era reservoir (or, inconclusively, a monument surrounded by overgrown weeds). They speak of and communicate with mushrooms and moss, and body-horror elements pop up here as well, but the overall vibe is now much more dreamy than nightmarish.

While the narrative is largely undecipherable, there are motifs that repeat across the various parts of the film and between different characters. One could argue that Komljen borrows from Lynch, especially in tackling trauma, the uncertainty of identity and the unreliability of memory, or from Cronenberg in the purely visceral sense, but these themes and, especially, the tactility of the body have long been part of his oddly authentic cinematic language. It is supported by top-level technical contributions, not least Ivan Marković and Jenny Lou Ziegel's luscious and disciplined cinematography that, at one point, disconcertingly, even employs thermal imagery. And when the credits roll and you see several names identified as “non-humans”, you can go back and reconsider what you thought you understood.

Desire Lines is a co-production between Serbia's Dart Film and Mak Film, Bosnia and Herzegovina's Marletti, the Netherlands' seriousFilm, Croatia's Pipser and Germany's Flaneur Films. Square Eyes has the international rights.