Ever watch a movie, and find yourself completely unsure whether you thought it was amazing or terrible?

I’d been wanting to see Brotherhood of the Wolf ever since I missed it in theaters back in ‘01. It looked like a pretty cool foreign period piece/horror flick about werewolves. I was bummed to keep checking Netflix and finding the movie’s DVD release status to be unknown, though, and eventually forgot it was in my queue.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I noticed it had been marked available, and immediately moved it to the top of my queue. It came, and last Friday Rebecca and I threw it into the player, kicked back … and were completely confounded.

It turns out Le pacte des loups isn’t a werewolf flick, or even really a horror flick, at all. It’s more of a brooding, existential detective story set in 18th century France, a character study of a man whose ahead-of-their-time beliefs and attitudes pit him against the unenlightened denizens of a village far from the science and scholarship of Paris. There’s a monster, sure, but for the vast majority of the movie, it’s just an unseen plot device, a reason for this educated man to find himself butting heads with ignorant peasants and backwoods religious freaks.

The film is slow, and rife with symbolism so obvious it’s clunky. It’s also gorgeous, and the climax, when it finally comes, is thrilling – more thrilling than it has any right to be, actually, after you’ve waited for it, gotten tired of waiting for it, and started to actually become interested in the story itself.

I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since, and still can’t decide how I feel about it. But I think these days, that in itself is a reason to recommend it – because it’s still sitting there, in my imagination, demanding to be considered.