From the first of its 10 mesmeric single takes, French filmmaker Jean-Paul Civeyrac conveys a sense of the eerily seductive territory to be traversed in Through the Forest. The seeming naturalism of two lovers—Armelle (Camille Berthomier) and Renaud (Jason Ciarapica), lounging and murmuring in postcoital tones of affectionate playfulness—is haunted by a subtle surrealism: A deliberately elusive mise-en-scène keeps his face out of frame and a strange quickening from morning sunlight to thunderstorm-impending pall evokes a subterranean dread which mars the idyllic depiction of rapturous love.

The film moves forward in this fashion, like a dream, which we soon learn this prelude has been. And, like a dream, what follows encompasses both the realistic and mystical in ways you don’t immediately question, borne along by the sublime elegance of the images washing over you and the propulsive flow of a distinctive internal logic; only retrospectively do you think to invoke the sequence of events in order to make sense of them. In this way, it recalls Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, which also beautifully chronicles a digressive—you find yourself happily lost in the details—and metaphysical journey towards death. Confirming the off-kilter sensations summoned by Through the Forest’s introduction, the next chapter reveals that Renaud died in a motorcycle accident months before and that Armelle, much to the chagrin of her sisters, has yet to surface from a grief-stricken depression.

Having relayed the deliciousness of sexual love through intensely recognizable details — mussed-up hair, languorous limbs akimbo, twisted sheets — overlaid with dramatically moody music, the director produces a headiness which submerges the spectator in the euphoric moment. Subsequent scenes demonstrate the striking bareness of life next to this heightened sensual awareness, the contrast perfectly encapsulating Armelle’s aching sense of loss, as she somnolently moves through an overcast universe. So it comes as no surprise when she decides to swallow a handful of pills.

From this point on, the narrative acquires an ever-growing opacity, as Through the Forest’s contemplative wrestling with the demons of death and desire find their fullest expression. After a hallucinatory episode entitled “Night,” during which Armelle appears to figuratively succumb to death, we find ourselves in a café where she sits, recently emerged from a coma, with her sisters. But has she really awakened? Civeyrac hints such may not be the case by positioning the trio against a wall so glaringly red it suffuses the scene with odd reverberations of the unreal. This, taken together with Armelle’s newfound powers of persuasion — she silently wills one man to give her a cigarette, another to light it, and compels her sisters to acknowledge their speedy marital engagements as artificial attempts to stave off the inevitable end — call into question the scenario’s authenticity. Or has she perhaps accessed these supernatural skills from her recent brush with the other side? Knowledge of prior paranormal encounters with a spiritual medium and Renaud look-alike, Hippolyte, makes it difficult to distinguish between slumbering fantasies and wakefulness. Then too, what does it impart that we never again meet her sisters — heretofore thoroughly involved in the ongoings?

Civeyrac encourages this uncertainty, even as he scatters clues. When he links the “True Happiness” chapter with the opening dream sequence by similarly incorporating a musical number into its evocation of bedroom delirium — conspicuously accompanied by nondiegetic music — he sends a clear signal: Armelle’s spontaneous singing occurs only in two isolated instances, and the later echoing of the earlier episode provides evidence she remains elsewhere in a state of unconsciousness. This passage also possesses the most stylistic exaggeration (that is, next to “Night”), a visual cue that invites skepticism. The shot begins on a floral arrangement. It casts a red glow onto the naked bodies of Armelle and Hippolyte as they discuss how long they’ve been making love (13 days?) before languidly circling the room to eventually alight again on the flowers which now lend a purplish-blue complexion, the color of a bruise, as the twosome arrive at another approximation (32 days?). The colors and choreography combined with the sparse dialogue infer the bizarre passage of time heavily associated with dreaming.

We remain in this hermetically sealed world, consisting solely of the pair, for the rest of Through the Forest. Its blissfully brief 65-minute running time — more movies should be as simultaneously concise and suggestive — affords it an evanescence that would’ve been lost if protracted, a fitting quality for a reverie upon the ephemeral. When Armelle finally, symbolically moves into a grove of hilltop trees, stirred by the sound of Renaud’s voice calling to her, leaves rustling in her wake, the lucidity of Civeyrac’s vision of love and death hits home.