Perhaps all anyone needs to know about Amer before they see it is a glimpse at the movie’s poster: a creepy hand reaches forward, out of a vertiginous spiral, grasping at the figure of a nude woman. This evocative fantasia doesn’t reveal much, but grabs attention. Sit down to watch the flick, by French-born, Belgium-based filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, and you’re hooked from the opening title sequence. There’s an intriguing bit of acoustic guitar, suddenly overwhelmedby the menacing gurgle of some weird 1960s Italian electronica that turns out to be from an old Bruno Nicolai soundtrack. Soon, we’re inside a young girl’s head, inside a creaky old house, where eyeballs peep through keyholes and the body of dead grandfather lies in stasis, ready to reanimate in a hallucinatory blink.

Constructed out of more than 900 separate shots, about one every six seconds, the film is nearly as keyed to optical reflex as a 1960s structural experiment from Tony Conrad or Paul Sharits. It was the most pleasurable, sheerly ciné-maniacal selection at March’s New Directors/New Films festival, at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater and the Museum of Modern Art.

Amer’s three half-hour segments trace the experience of the girl, Ana, from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood, advancing from a magical innocence (ripe with gothic tingles and primal scenery) to a budding, rebellious sensuality to… OK, the film is an unabashed MASH note to the bent-sinister giallo classics of Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, among others—a sexy, gap-toothed Euro Teen sashaying for the benefit of a cliffside biker gang, giving way to nocturnal stalking, black leather gloves brandishing a straight razor and a dramatic return to forbidding corridors.

With less than 30 lines of dialogue, though, Amer is more iconic poetry than explicit narrative, not a giallo per se, but a latter-day remix of its tropes, conjured in a disorienting rush of susurrations and extreme close-ups of bellybuttons and parted lips. If the filmmakers have done their job right, all sorts of hairs should be raised, along with attendant tingles.

“Giallo is the perfect genre in which to talk about desire, about sexuality, about fear and desire,” Cattet said, when we sat down for a post-screening chat last fall in Sitges, Spain, where the film was shown at the city’s annual Fantastic film festival. The director was joined by Forzani, who is both her creative partner and boyfriend. It’s the first feature for the young pair, who have previously made experimental shorts. “When you are with someone you love, in a couple,” Forzani said, “you see them always up close.”

The film’s opening and closing segments are set in an old house in the south of France, near where Forzani grew up. “It has been abandoned since 25 years ago,” he said. “It belongs to the city. It’s one of the last houses that exist in the area, that hasn’t been torn down by developers.” The filmmakers worked on a low budget, shooting in the Super 16mm format to get a grainy, ‘70s visual feel—not unlike Ti West’s The House of the Devil, which shares a certain spirit and will surely end up on some future Halloween double bill with Amer. Only, the adult Ana was a professional actress. Her younger incarnations were played by girls whom Cattet and Forzani discovered. Interestingly, they all have gaps between their eye teeth, a key detail that must have been an issue in terms of casting and continuity.

“We had seen Marie Bos in the theater and we liked her,” Forzani said, referring to the adult Ana. “After that, we matched.”

I had to mention Les Blank’s great documentary Gap-Toothed Women, suggesting they look it up on YouTube. This prompted some alchohol-assisted laughter. “Ah yes!” Forzani said. “It’s like fetishist stuff!”