Helēna feels unfulfilled in her marriage to Rihards, a university lecturer. Together with their children Ēriks and Maija, they go to their house in the countryside to renovate it as Helēna hopes to soon be able to organise dance retreats there. More surprising than the dreariness of their relationship are the creatures that inhabit their forest house – fleshy caterpillars in the wallpaper, slithering worms on the dinner plates, and stag beetles on the damp walls. As the terror of the insects takes hold, Helēna and Rihards each take up positions on opposing front lines in a war that also uncovers the children’s phobias and losses they have not yet processed.

Aik Karapetian’s symbolic drama, with touches of horror, captures the uncomfortable (and deliciously ironic) truths behind the façade of family life. The filmmaker exposes this by playing with Dario Argento’s iconic giallo horror Suspiria (1977), David Cronenberg’s surreal classic Naked Lunch (1991), and mocks it by using white Ghostbusters jumpsuits. Karapetian is the director who makes horror films most consistently in Latvian cinema. His filmography includes the witty, referential horror film The Man in the Orange Jacket (2014), as well as Firstborn (2017), which illustrates the fears of a young father. This time around, the director meditates on the notion of “shame” and how it is expressed among those closest to us. The family unit is the perfect setting for a lesson in the anatomy of the psyche, and it can be terrifyingly entertaining.