“There is something beguiling about Levers that makes you not want to look away.”

Somewhere in Manitoba’s Red River Valley, a crowd witnesses the unveiling of a statue, standing tall like a ghost under its red shroud. Soon a new veil will be thrown, this time over the world. A loud bang can be heard in the sky, and the world turns dark. People come together to gather around their TV sets, hoping for news of a new sunrise. But in the Red River Valley life goes on as if nothing happened. A civil servant is determined to get to the bottom of it all though, and starts an investigation into the mysterious sculptor, who may or may not have something to do with the darkness that has the world in its grasp.

‘May or may not’ are indeed key words when trying to explain just what Manitoban director Rhayne Vermette’s second feature Levers, a follow-up to her lauded Ste. Anne, is about. As shrouded in darkness as the world in her film, if only for a day, its narrative has a fever dream quality that is hard to pin down. Bathed in deep hues and full of film trickery like double exposure, this 16mm mystery box has everything from tarot playing nuns to a dead bear, but provides little explanation of what is going on. There is an eerie quality to it, like a lo-fi Twin Peaks: The Return, or Stranger Things if it was filmed with a broken Bolex camera.

There is something hypnotizing about Vermette’s imagery, shot by the director herself in cooperation with Ryan Steel, Heidi Phillips, and Kristiane Church, certainly once it’s combined with a gloomy score (by Bret Parenteau) and the ominous sound design by Catie Pescitelli. The frame is often draped in darkness, and when the light returns it frequently becomes avant-garde experimentation, but there is something beguiling about Levers that makes you not want to look away. Punctuated by hand-drawn chapter markers projected over the image, the story eventually is bathed in sunlight again, when we run into what looks like a cult and a bunch of nuns whose headless Maria statue may signal that the Lord might not be their saviour anymore after the unexpected day-long solar eclipse. It seems tarot is their new bible.

There must be something in the water in Manitoba, the way it produces idiosyncratic filmmakers like Guy Maddin and Matthew Rankin, and now Rhayne Vermette. Going by her first two films, the 43-year-old Métis filmmaker who shot this film on the lands where her mixed-race indigenous forefathers originated, is driven even less by narrative, and more by dreamlike (or nightmarish), associative imagery that elicits a visceral reaction. Levers tonally dabbles in the horror and thriller genres, and mystery hangs over the many shots in which people find their way through the dark, with only torches to lead the way. Too niche to travel far (it is in Toronto’s more adventurous Wavelengths section for a reason), Levers is nevertheless an enigmatic work from a singular director with a sensual touch to her visual style.