A railroad, having circumvented a small 19th-century Silesian town, has cut off most of the money that used to flow into it. If a station can be built at the town’s edge to intercept some of the travelers, the town can be resurrected and the owner of the station can become rich. A gentle, scholarly Jew and a rapacious Christian vie for the land. Meanwhile, Simon Magus (Noah Taylor), an unwashed mendicant who’s shunned both by the gentiles of the town and by his own Jewish community, converses with a demon named Sirius (an imposing Ian Holm) and does a lot of creepy, quasi-diabolical things. Like his Biblical namesake — a Jew who tried to purchase a place as one of Christ’s apostles, thus inventing the sin of simony — Simon eventually converts to Christianity, doing so not out of spiritual dissatisfaction but in the self-serving hope that his wealth and magical potency might increase. " I hate the Jews, " he adds with a snort.

In his directorial debut, Ben Hopkins has spun a strange, torpid film, a dystopic fairy tale, mist-shrouded and mystical. His evocation of this permanently overcast dreamscape, rather than the somewhat convoluted morality tale at its center, is what makes Simon Magus worth seeing.