Amat Escalante's The Untamed is bizarre and visceral even by central American standards; having pushed drug cartel violence to the max in his previous film Heli, he has invented his own brand of science fiction to talk about repressed desire, misogyny and Mexico's endemic problem of violence towards women.

The Untamed is certainly the strangest film in the Melbourne Film Festival.

Not that the women in his story are cast as victims. This is the new woman's story in South and Central European cinema: a macho culture may have trained them for obedient motherhood, but they're not taking anything lying down. All credit to Sebastian Lelio's middle-aged clubber Gloria, who broke ground in Chile in 2013.

Lelio himself has moved on to make a vibrant film about a tender but resilient transgender heroine, A Fantastic Woman; another Mexican, Michel Franco, is at MIFF with April's Daughter, which stars Pedro Almodovar's most recent muse Emma Suarez as a monstrously manipulative, man-eating mother who undermines then steals her pregnant daughter's life. These senoras know what they want.

Escalante says he was inspired to make The Untamed by real-world issues: the murder of women and dumping and discovery of women's bodies is a phenomenon all over Mexico, not just in the border towns where it has been most reported.

A specific stimulus came from the case of a young male nurse who was murdered on the local beat, a story reported by the popular tabloid paper as "Faggot drowns".

"Instead of putting, 'A guy that worked at a hospital and was helping people was killed and drowned', they put it in this other way," says Escalante. "Just to sell and to feed the ignorance, the stupidity of the public."

He didn't want to make a documentary about that.

"That is also quite interesting, but ... I had done three films that were very grounded, very real," he says." I wanted to explain it in a more metaphorical way."

Escalante's approach was to scramble those statistics with a grotesque story of an unhappily married couple, Angel and Alejandra; their perverse friend Veronica; and Fabian, Alejandra's brother.

Angel is living a necessarily secret life - he is having a sexual relationship with Fabian, conducted in five-minute bursts in the fields - which he tries to bury by muttering streams of homophobic invective into Alejandra's ear in lieu of love.

All three are relieved to make a new friend, Veronica (Simone Bucio), who takes them to the site of a pit created by a meteor, and a nearby farmer's woodshed which now contains something very, very nasty. Nasty, but irresistible.

"The point is not that it comes from another world," says Escalante. "I just wanted to make it possible. We don't know what is out in space."

What's behind that shed door is so thrilling that the women keep coming back for more, despite knowing that the creature is slowly eating them alive. Even the animals within the meteor's reach are affected; perhaps the film's strangest scene is one in which farmyard animals, snakes, armadillos and a pair of tortoises seethe and heave together in a mass orgy. No clear interpretation is offered.

"I guess it's about being free as a person," says Escalante. "That is very difficult, to be honest with yourself and who you are, a lot of problems and deformations occur - like being with a woman when you shouldn't - things that are not natural that come out because Angel is not being himself."

No scientifically illusionist explanation of the meteor and its works is given either, which has annoyed the sci-fi buffs who expect at least some attempt to keep things rational.

"I go with intuition," says Escalante. "I trust if it somehow makes sense to me - and I'm not talking about the story, but the ideas and how to signify something - I trust that it will make sense to an audience. It is high risk. I just hope that as long as I am truthful, the thing comes out without pretensions."

His voluptuously horrible films are always the most hated at any film festival, he says with some satisfaction. "But there is also a lot of support out there."

Screenings: The Untamed, Forum Theatre, August 18; A Fantastic Woman, Forum Theatre, August 12 and Hoyts Melbourne Central, August 16; April's Daughter, Forum Theatre, August 9 and 13.

The Age is a Melbourne International Film Festival partner.

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