At certain moments in this dreamily erotic, playfully baffling and beautifully shot movie, I found myself thinking of the naked Pan shepherd at the beginning of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. There is the same elusive sense of humour. The Ornithologist is highly diverting and seductive, a pastoral of sorts, and a secular meditation on faith and acceptance, very loosely derived from the life of St Anthony of Padua. However, it retreats into a kind of shaggy-dog whimsy by the end, and doesn’t entirely live up to its visionary promise.

A bird-watcher called Fernando (Paul Hamy) is looking for black storks in remote northern Portugal. Transfixed by the sight of them through his binoculars while kayaking, he incautiously pays no attention to the quickening currents and is swept away by rapids, regaining consciousness in dense forest. Here, he encounters two Christian Chinese pilgrims, Fei (Han Wen) and Ling (Chan Suan), who have badly lost their way on a journey to Santiago de Compostela, and then a shepherd called Jesus (Xelo Cagiao), whose name is not so obviously freighted with metaphorical significance in this part of the world. Does the spirit of St Anthony live in Fernando? It is a question raised when a certain metamorphosis brings the director, João Pedro Rodrigues, into the film himself.

The Ornithologist is a film to compare with other jungle films such as Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, although those have more innate seriousness. The Ornithologist has its own lightness and almost indefinable charm.