From idiosyncratic filmmaker/composer Hal Hartley comes something wholly unexpected: an Icelandic monster movie. But not quite a horror film. We first meet the monster (Robocop’s Robert John Burke) confessing on tape to some brutal murders. The tape finds its way to Beatrice (Sarah Polley), a self-possessed secretary who works for network news maven Helen Mirren (cold, bitchy, perfect). Beatrice travels to Iceland to discover what happened to a missing news crew that included her fiancé. Her plane crashes, and after painful surgery (at the hands of a pensive, luminous Julie Christie), she eventually finds the monster that has devoured the journalists and half the island village.

Burke is a marvel as the monster, a profane, hard-drinking, erudite sort in a Victorian frock coat with leathery stalagmites growing from his head. He’s been alive forever, and nothing can kill him but the willful imagination of a myopic Dr. Artaud (many literary and mythic homages here). So brave, kind Beatrice (Polley is perfect as this tough ingenue) agrees to help him die. Dark, absurd, romantic, No Such Thing is quintessential Hartley (inscrutable dialogue, bold color, emotional dysfunction) but also bears the stamp of filmmaker/ co-producer Fridrik Thór Fridriksson (Children of Nature) and production designer Árni Páll Jóhannsson, whose vision of Iceland is a mossy, alien moonscape. There will be inevitable comparisons with Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, but Hartley eschews melodrama for a knowing clarity, and his dreamy, edgy musical score is a revelation.