If John Boorman, Terrence Malick and Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr got together to make a cautionary tale of doomed romance, it would resemble something like Delta. Kornél Mundruczó’s minimalist, stylistically self-assured feature played to mixed reactions at Cannes in 2008. It managed to nab the International Critics’ prize there, then screened without much notice at last year’s TIFF.

As the cunningly simple story goes, a nameless man returns to his birthplace in Romania’s desolate Danube delta region and is greeted by his widowed mother, her new beau and a sister he’s never met. The locals become viciously riled when the man and his estranged sister initiate a quasi-physical relationship that gradually becomes less quasi, culminating in an utterly harrowing climax. (It’s dumbfounding that this movie got a PG rating in Canada.)

With its distinctive, artful visual style and severely nihilistic outlook, it’s easy to see how Delta could be trying for even the art-house demographic. It contains little empathy and is immediate in its bleak downward spiral. A remarkably crafted yet deeply upsetting single-take sequence, filmed in an extreme long shot, sets the tone for the film’s hopeless second half. The unsmiling, nearly mute cast can’t express the emotions conveyed in the film’s austere style and elemental symbolism as well as Mátyás Erdély’s photography. We’re left with a solemn, mystifying sequence of events that are as hard to define as they are to forget.